Welcome back to the 2026 MLB Front Office Rankings. If you missed them, you can catch up on the first three articles here:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Teams 30-21

Part 3: Teams 20-11

TIER 3: DEVILS ROLL THE DICE, ANGELS ROLL THEIR EYES

10. New York Mets
President of Baseball Operations: David Stearns

The Mets were still a three-ring circus when Stearns took over late in the 2023 season. To recap quickly: Their previous ownership group both got wrapped up in the largest Ponzi scheme in human history and fancied themselves true baseball men in the same ways as Jim Crane, constantly interfering with everything. So they spent most of the 2010s both broke and making profoundly stupid roster decisions. Steve Cohen bought the team six years ago and made a lot of promises while running through a boatload of front office personnel. Until Stearns, he had also been turned down by most of the people he wanted to hire. Stearns very quickly cemented the modernization of the team’s processes, moving very heavily towards contemporary scouting and player development techniques that the Mets had already been edging towards under Cohen.

If you inverted the order of operations of the last three Mets seasons—start out with a not-really-competitive year where young kids came on late, then follow it up with a competitive year where they just missed, then in year three a big NLCS run—this would all look like a huge win and a team on the rise. But here in Earth-1, the NLCS appearance was in 2024, followed by signing Juan Soto to the largest contract in MLB history, and that makes missing the playoffs in 2025 and 2026 look bad.

But zooming out, I’m not sure that’s a lot more than a bad look. The Mets weren’t truly one of the four best teams in baseball in 2024; they just had a magical run. They were also saddled with some truly dreadful long-term planning from the rotating cast of characters which had been running the team for the prior ten years that was going to leave them very heavy on declining corner players very quickly. That drove the decision to dump Brandon Nimmo and let Pete Alonso walk, even knowing that Alonso was likely to have another big year or two. (If you haven’t been living under a Mets-adjacent rock, he certainly had another big year.) It’s led to rampant trade speculation about Francisco Lindor, who looks like he might be headed to a corner himself sooner rather than later.

The processes here, I think, are still pretty sound. They’ve gone hard after pitch traits in the draft, even pre-dating Stearns’s arrival by a year or two, and they’ve started showing real success with that. The first draft pick of the Stearns/Kris Gross era was Carson Benge, and even if he isn’t trending like a game-breaking superstar, he already started racking four-win seasons this year. I’ve liked a lot of their free agent moves, even some of the ones like Sean Manaea and Jorge Polanco which haven’t really worked out, although the Bo Bichette contract remains baffling in both the multiple player optouts and the shrinkage of the 2026 draft pool. They just added Derek Falvey to the front office yesterday, and he’s been a successful executive with a similar version to Stearns for a long time. I see a lot of what the Mets do and go “yeah, that makes sense to me.”

The biggest problem I see with what they’re doing is a lack of awareness of their own surroundings. They’ve repeatedly seemed blindsided in free agency where they look like they’ve made a godfather offer, only for another team—most often the Dodgers—to come in and match or top it. Soto notwithstanding, most players are going to prefer the constant winning (and sun) in Los Angeles to the up-and-down situation in Queens. They have underrated injury risk and put too much stock in getting “their guys” on the market instead of the best values. That’s fine if you hit on them, but Freddy Peralta was not actually an ace, Ryan Helsley was not still a top closer, and Cedric Mullins was not still a good outfielder. The Mets paid top dollar for all three as if they were, and those prospects traded may yet haunt him. One wonders how much of this is front office driven and how much is ownership, but that might genuinely be worse; most of the teams with overly-involved owners are in the bottom tiers.

If this front office is as good as I think they are, they’re probably going to get a lot better and rise up the rankings. And if they’re not, I doubt Cohen will extend them infinite patience to continue moving on.