“People are what’s most interesting, and perhaps that’s all we should be interested in. For everything else around us is either the atmosphere in which we live, or instruments that we use for ourselves.”
—“Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” Goethe
David Stearns does not traffic in the pithy.
And so the line that best captured the 2026 Mets wasn’t “Just win, baby” or “My **** doesn’t work in the playoffs.” It was this, from Friday: “There’s performance variability at all segments of the player universe.”
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Asked about how to project Jared Young, Stearns summed up the lesson that’s been hammered into the Mets all season. The 2026 Mets are a testament to that performance variability. They have failed not because they trusted too much in younger players like Nolan McLean and Carson Benge but because their purported stars faceplanted.
Let’s look at many of the key pieces entering this season to see how they’ve underperformed, according to FanGraphs’ version of wins above replacement.
Player | 2025 | 2026 | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
6.1 | 1.9 | 4.2 | |
5.7 | 3.1 | 2.6 | |
3.8 | 1.9 | 1.9 | |
3.5 | 1.7 | 1.8 | |
3.2 | 1.4 | 1.8 | |
2.6 | -1.6 | 4.2 | |
2.2 | -0.1 | 2.3 | |
2.2 | 0.3 | 1.9 | |
1.9 | 1.7 | 0.2 | |
1.8 | 1.5 | 0.3 | |
1.4 | -0.7 | 2.1 | |
1.4 | 0.7 | 0.7 | |
1.3 | 0.6 | 0.7 | |
0.5 | 0.7 | -0.2 | |
0.3 | -1.0 | 1.3 | |
37.9 | 12.1 | 25.8 |
The WARs for 2026 are extrapolated to the end of the season — from Sunday for players still with the club and from the player’s last game with the Mets if he was sent elsewhere.
That table includes the Mets’ Opening Day starters, those expected to play regularly in platoon roles, their Opening Day rotation and their closer — in essence, the 16 Mets expected to play the biggest roles on the 2026 team (with apologies to Luis Torrens and Young, who have won themselves larger roles). Fifteen of them have been worse than they were a year ago, in some cases by a wide margin. One — one! – is on pace to be better: Sean Manaea, by two-tenths of a win.
This is overwhelming underperformance, stunning in its comprehensiveness — like all nine Springfield Nuclear Power Plant ringers suffering nine misfortunes: “Three misfortunes? That’s possible. Seven misfortunes? There’s an outside chance. But nine misfortunes?”
Before the season, I leaned on the same phrase to describe the Mets’ offseason overhaul: The team had raised its ceiling while also lowering its floor. That was the tradeoff in moving off more reliable veteran players — albeit ones with their own variability, as shown this season — to players with considerably less consistent track records. I, like many people, expected the Mets to operate close to their ceiling. Instead, they’ve been a piece of expectorated gum, smashed and ultimately indistinct from the floor. (They are on pace to go 73-89, or three games better than the 2009 Mets team I considered the worst-case scenario in that linked spring story.)
So how do you go about fixing a team that underperforms this comprehensively?
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“It’s why the best teams in baseball every year have really good depth,” Stearns said. “That’s why we talk about depth as much as we do. The best teams in baseball recognize there are going to be performance fluctuations and not everything is going to go as hoped, and they account for that and they plan for that.”
It’s not like Stearns has ignored depth, of course: It was one of his primary calling cards with the Brewers, and the Mets had done well in building out their depth in his first two seasons.
Where did that go wrong this season?
“If we look at the first half of the season and look at the back half of our rotation and its performance, that wasn’t good enough,” Stearns said. “We had too many games where we weren’t giving ourselves a consistent shot early in games.”
That is pretty obviously the case. David Peterson and Kodai Senga were trading bad outings early in the season, consistently digging the Mets holes that an injured and slumping offense couldn’t climb out of. I’d venture that New York’s depth issues extended to first base. When Jorge Polanco proved incapable of staying on the field, Mark Vientos and Brett Baty couldn’t fill in. Young has done nicely the last few months; the Mets still have the worst WAR at first base in the major leagues.
What can Stearns take away from 2026’s harsh experience?
“There are a number of lessons there. You can never have too much starting pitching,” he said. “You have to provide yourself avenues on your roster to give other players a chance when you’re not getting the performance you expected. In both those areas, the first couple months, we came up short.”
The second part of that answer is intriguing. It wasn’t just that Peterson and Senga were so bad for the Mets to start the season; it was that New York’s roster inflexibility in the pitching staff prevented it from trying more potential solutions. (Manaea’s long stay in the bullpen was a particular handcuff at that point in time.)
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And so when thinking about how Stearns plans to improve the Mets this winter, it’s useful to apply those lessons to think through how the Mets can better equip themselves with depth across the roster. In the rotation, that might be viewing Zac Thornton more as depth than as a member of the starting five entering spring training. Among position players, it’s probably cutting down on the number of players who are defensively limited and/or out of minor-league options.
For a team like the Mets, an emphasis on depth doesn’t have to mean shying away from bigger acquisitions. But those bigger acquisitions can and do flop sometimes, and New York has to be ready for it better than it was in 2026.
The exposition
The Mets rallied late on Sunday to claim the series over the Giants. New York is 65-78.
The Marlins got back to .500 by snagging the series finale of a set with the Cubs. Miami’s 72-72 record has it four games back in the wild-card chase.
The Yankees dropped two of three in San Diego to go 3-3 out West. They’re 81-62 on the season, four back of the Rays in the AL East and 2 1/2 ahead of the Red Sox for the first wild card. They host the Rockies starting Tuesday before the Mets visit the Bronx on Friday.
The pitching possibles
at Miami
RHP Jonah Tong (1-1, 3.60 ERA) v. RHP Eury Pérez (7-10, 3.72 ERA)
LHP Sean Manaea (4-7, 4.70) v. RHP Sandy Alcantara (13-9, 3.54)
RHP Robert Stock (1-3, 5.81) v. RHP Janson Junk (6-9, 4.00)
at New York (AL)
RHP Nolan McLean (11-8, 3.06) v. LHP Carlos Rodón (5-3, 3.09)
LHP Zac Thornton (3-5, 3.53) v. RHP Gerrit Cole (8-7, 3.29)
RHP Christian Scott (4-4, 3.81) v. RHP Cam Schlittler (12-6, 2.04)
Injury updates
Player | Injury | Elig. | ETA |
|---|---|---|---|
Left forearm strain | Now | September | |
Right shoulder strain | Now | September | |
Left ankle bursitis | Now | 2027 | |
Tommy John surgery | Now | 2027 | |
Tommy John surgery | Now | 2027 |
Red = 60-day IL
Orange = 15-day IL
Blue = 10-day IL
- Williams is in the midst of a throwing program but has yet to toss off a mound. That will have to happen soon to give him enough time to return this season.
Minor-league schedule
Triple-A: Syracuse at St. Paul (Minnesota)
Double-A: Binghamton at Portland (Boston)
High-A: Brooklyn’s season is over
Low-A: St. Lucie’s season is over
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A note on the epigraph
“Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” was the first novel I was assigned in college. Most everything thereafter was easier for me to understand.
(I really do like Goethe, though I doubt I’ll go back to this one.)
Trivia time
Mariano Rivera pitched in 34 Subway Series games. The next four relievers who have appeared in the most Subway Series games have all been members of both the Mets and Yankees. Who are they?
(I’ll reply to the correct answers in the comments.)
