All the bright young guys running baseball teams in the modern world, they all have a plan that they sell to their owners, and if they sell it well enough, that’s how they get to run these teams. Some then compile the kind of resume that David Stearns did in Milwaukee with the Brewers, the foundation that he helped build there, one still very much in place, you can see it by the way the Brewers keep winning without him in the front office, and without Craig Counsell as the manager.
Maybe Stearns’ plan and his vision in Milwaukee would finally have produced a World Series team. We’ll never know that now. All we know is that he is with the Mets now, and he and Steve Cohen are the kind of power couple in baseball that Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman are with the Yankees.
And we are going to find out plenty about the Mets’ power couple a month from now at the trade deadline, especially if the Mets have played another month of baseball comparable to the one they just finished playing, when they put together the best record in baseball from the last night of May going into the last weekend of June.
Really, what we’re going to find out is this:
If the way the Mets have turned things around in June, the way a terrific first-year manager in Carlos Mendoza has helped hold his team and his season together, is going to force Stearns to sacrifice his long-range plan and his long-range vision and make a short-range run at a wild card in the National League East.
Cohen especially owes his fans exactly that a year after he did the right thing and unloaded Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander and essentially threw in the towel, seven months after the Mets had won 101 games for him and might have won more if Scherzer didn’t already look like a shot case at the end, when he couldn’t win the games he was hired to win.
It wasn’t so long ago, by the way, that Cohen did the right thing again when the subject of the trade deadline was raised, at a time when it looked like a roof had caved in on the 2024 Mets. People around here wanted to know if the Mets were going to hold another fire sale at the ’24 deadline, one that might even include Pete Alonso, even though Alonso is well on his way to being the greatest home run hitter in the history of the franchise. Cohen at the time effectively told everybody to slow their roll, let the season continue to play out, then he would see and we would see where his team was at the end of July.
Here is what the Mets owner said when he was in London with the team, which provided a stirring bottom-of-the-9th comeback win against the Phillies:
“I tell you, it’s amazing. Forgetting the Mets, all anybody wants to talk about in the season — it’s not the season. It’s the trade deadline. It’s going to come, guys. I’m telling you, it’s going to come. It will be here shortly. But in the meanwhile, I’m going to focus on winning games.”
The Mets looked as dreary at the end of May as the team they’re playing this weekend, the Astros, did at the time. Then Cohen’s team was 15-6 in June coming into this weekend and the Astros were 15-7 and when the two teams met on Friday night at Citi Field, they were both at .500.
The Astros, though, have more muscle memory of winning on which to fall back than the Mets do. A lot more. Even last year, when they were back in another league championship series but got upset this time by the Rangers, they were still a win away from another World Series. Last year the Mets finished 12 games under .500 and suddenly this season were 11 games under .500 before the players held that players-only meeting and things began to change, and in a hurry.
But it was more than one meeting, come on. It was the steady hand of Mendoza, who might end up having the kind of rookie season that Brian Daboll did with the Giants if the Mets do make it back to the postseason. Mendoza moved Francisco Lindor to leadoff and watched Lindor take off. He dropped Brandon Nimmo down in the order and watched him take off. He had a right to wonder how the season would have started for the Mets if they had signed J.D. Martinez sooner than they did, especially now that they have seen the Mets, and especially the younger Mets, respond not just to Martinez’s hitting, but his passion for the science of hitting, even at the age of 36.
And, of course, here came Francisco Alvarez, swinging his way off the injured list after going on it more than two months ago. That wasn’t a surprise to any of us who have been watching Alvarez come on the way he has, and fast. A bigger surprise has been the stick the other kid in the infield, Mark Vientos, has shown. There was a game when he hit two against the Yankees and Alvarez hit a laser the next night, as the Mets put 21 runs on the Yankees in two Subway Series games, doing that against Gerrit Cole and Luis Gil, the Yankees’ two best starters.
By the way, when the Mets were 22-33 after their first 55 games, the Yankees were 37-18. Then over the next stretch of season the Yankees went 15-13 and the Mets went 17-6, the stretch culminating for them with as bad a Subway Series beatdown as they have ever put on their friends from across town. It must be no fun at all for the Yankees watching as the Astros, who have been the Yankees’ bogey men for nearly a decade and the Mets both get up off the mat at the same time.
It is hard to believe that the Yankees will keep playing the way they did against the Mets, and the way they did when they got to Toronto and lost 9-2 there, making it 30 runs against them in their last three games. It is difficult to believe that the Mets are going to stay this hot. What they’re doing is not sustainable without a closer, and no one knows what they’re getting when Sticky Fingers Diaz’s suspension is over, the way no one knows if he has been relying on sticky stuff for a while and simply not having been caught.
We are about to find out how much game they’ve really got now that they reach the official halfway point of the season on Sunday. And we sure will see about David Stearns, the new guy, and if his team’s recent success might have gotten in the way of his plan, whatever he says in public.
This wasn’t Stearns’ team, not really, when the season started. It is now. And the situation on the ground has changed. He may need a new plan.
WHAT A MONTH FOR THE METS, JUDGE AND OHTANI SET FOR EPIC HOME RUN BATTLE & REDICK TRYING TOO HARD …
It is interesting to note that at a time when the Yankees are looking for corner infielders, the Mets have Alonso and Vientos across the diamond from each other.
And at a time when the Yankees are worried about their catching situation, the Mets have Alvarez.
Basically, it’s very much worth noting that the season has gone like this so far in New York:
The Yankees won the first two months.
But the Mets sure did win the last one.
Seriously, when was the last time you saw a good Yankee team — and this is still a very good Yankees team — watch the top three guys in their rotation start games in which the other team scored 30 runs, which is what just happened.
Now that the Knicks have Mikal Bridges, it doesn’t hurt nearly as badly that back in 2018 they drafted Kevin Knox II one pick before Bridges.
You know who went after Bridges?
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
I’m sure Bronny James is a very nice young man.
But I don’t care where he’s going to play next season.
This has a chance to be some Home Run Derby the rest of the way between our guy in New York, No. 99 of the Yankees, and Shohei in Los Angeles.
For all of the focus on the Orioles and Yankees in the AL East, the best team in the league as we move up on July 4, always an important mile-marker in the baseball season, is the Cleveland Guardians.
It was a good thing to hear Michael Kay call out JJ Redick for his casual use of the F-word at the press conference introducing him as the new coach of the Lakers.
You know what that really was with Redick?
Somebody trying too hard.
Way too hard.
If debates like we witnessed the other night are really a determining factor in who the next president is going to be, the country is even dumber than I’ve started to think it is.
One more thing:
Were Jake Tapper and Dana Bash afraid somebody was going to turn off their microphones if they asked a follow-up question?
Kenny Atkinson is going to be a great fit for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Hey, he’d still be a great fit with the Nets.
Somebody explain to me if something other than jealousy is getting Caitlin Clark bounced around this way.
The best thing that could happen in the women’s draw at Wimbledon is if Naomi Osaka, who was once on her way to being one of the great players of all time, makes a run.
How about we handle Aaron Rodgers’ spiritual journey, to Egypt or anywhere else, this way going forward?
How about he leaves the rest of us out of it?
I think the Mets just scored another run against the Yankees.
What?
Too soon?
