Following the Mets’ 2025 collapse, David Stearns addressed the media and answered questions on where things went wrong during the season. On the same day where Steve Cohen issued an online apology to the fanbase following the disappointing year, Stearns accepted responsibility as the architect of the team and re-affirmed his commitment to moving the team forward and making them a better club in the future after what he called a year that brought about “extreme disappointment”.
The biggest immediate
takeaway was that Carlos Mendoza would be the manager going into 2026. Stearns was pretty firm on that point, noting that Mendoza exhibits the same characteristics today that he had when the club hired him. In terms of the coaching staff, he said they will sit down and seriously evaluate the rest of the staff before coming to any conclusions on who might be returning. In terms of finding a GM, he claimed, “At this point, we always remain open should the perfect candidate come about, but it’s not something we’re going to go out and do a search process for”.
Stearns offered his key takeaways on what went wrong, harping repeatedly on the team’s inability to prevent runs. He singled that out as the biggest issue with the club, and said that he didn’t do a good enough job addressing it mid-season when the issues arose, saying, “We didn’t do enough to fortify our team when we had injuries”. He also discussed defense as a key problem and contributed to the run prevention and pitching issues, stating that their roster construction forced them to put in suboptimal defenders at several positions. Despite what he referred to as “tremendous support” from both ownership and the fanbase, he said, “You point to a decision that didn’t work out, I’m responsible for it” while adding, “Clearly, the moves we made at the trade deadline, or at least a subset of those moves, didn’t work, and in some cases made us worse”.
The last thing he called attention to was the offense, which failed to score the runs they needed to score despite historic years from their big players. He called it “inexplicable” that the team went 0-for-70 when trailing heading into the ninth, but he did not view leadership as an issue in the team’s shortcomings, stating that the team itself was well equipped in terms of leaders.
Stearns spent a fair amount of time talking about where the club goes from here. He noted that they had not had discussions yet on how to handle the offseason, and refused to outline the shape of the rotation moving forward given the emergence of Nolan McLean, Brandon Sproat, and Jonah Tong in the latter weeks of the season. Regarding McLean, he did state, “Nolan had a tremendous run for us…I’m not going to sit here and map out our starting rotation for next year, but I would expect Nolan to play a big part for our team next year” He felt that he and his team had expressed urgency on the trade market and expects to do so again, and said that they will look both internally and externally to fix the problem areas he addressed. He noted a willingness to be more proactive as a key area of improvement for his own process, but did say that, in response to not addressing the rotation at the deadline, that the fanbase would probably have been angry had he made some of the moves that were out there in front of him—he did not elaborate further here.
Lastly, he addressed some key questions around players of interest to the media and the fanbase. Pete Alonso’s name came up, to which Stearns explained that Alonso has been a tremendous Met and would love to have him back, though warned that they would have to see how the offseason played out. When asked about Edwin Díaz, who has not yet expressed his decision to opt out, he left that up to the closer to make the decision before addressing how they would operate. He did explain that the club always looks at what that player means on the field, to the fanbase, and to the community, when making the final decision on how to proceed. When asked about Kodai Senga, he was cautious, saying it would be foolish to put his name in pen for 30 starts but noting they’d like to maximize his talent after two tough years. He also confirmed that Francisco Alvarez would have surgery on his ligament in the coming days.
Overall, Stearns said about all you could expect him to say one day after a terrible collapse like that. He seemed genuinely shocked by the outcome and remorseful at how the season turned out, and laid out a pretty reasonable approach, saying that their plan is to continue developing frontline talent in the minors while remaining open to all possibilities in the short-term. The coming weeks and months will be some of the most important in this franchise’s 64-year history, as they are left to again pick up the pieces after a bitter disappointment in a year with sky-high expectations.
