Photo: Brett Davis-Imagn/USA TODAY Sports/Reuters
Dave Dombrowski has had a stellar career as a major league baseball executive, reviving the moribund Detroit Tigers before constructing World Series champs in Florida and Boston. On a Sunday night in late September his current club, the Philadelphia Phillies, had been in first place for months and was on the verge of winning its first division title in 13 years. But as he stood in the visiting team dugout at Citi Field, his eyes narrowed. “When David Stearns came here to the Mets, it wasn’t like I was jumping up and down,” Dombrowski told me. “Because he understands how to win.”
The speed with which Stearns has been able to win, though, has been a surprise to most everyone, including himself. One year ago, the Mets were a $420 million disaster, dumping aging All-Star pitchers Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander as the team staggered to a 75-87 record and a fourth-place finish in the National League East. So last September the Mets’ multi-billionaire owner, Steve Cohen, cut a deal to hire Stearns as president of baseball operations. Both men talked about 2024 as a low-expectation, transitional season. And sure enough, through June 2nd the team was a lousy 24-35, a record maybe best expressed by the embarrassing LOL Mets moment when a relief pitcher hurled his glove into the stands in disgust.
But Stearns kept making key changes to the roster. In mid-May, he endorsed unproven Mark Vientos as the starting third baseman, and the 24-year-old responded with 27 homers and 70 runs batted in. Then he promoted journeyman infielder Jose Iglesias from the minors; the 34-year-old didn’t simply hit .337, he provided a musical catchphrase, “OMG,” that ended up encapsulating the team’s sense of joy and surprise. In late July, at the trading deadline, Stearns picked up a starting pitcher and four relievers, plus outfielder Jesse Winker. Francisco Lindor, once an underperforming star, started playing like an MVP. The Mets caught fire, becoming the best team in baseball over the last four months.
This being the Mets, the surge was of course followed by a last-minute near-death experience. Three straight losses in the final week of the season forced the team to travel to Atlanta, the scene of multiple Mets traumas, for a doubleheader Monday, in which they needed to win one game to salvage a playoff berth. Down 3-0 in the eighth inning in the first game and looking lifeless, the Mets rallied, blew a lead, and then rallied again, with Lindor crushing a decisive ninth-inning homer. It was a fittingly wild ending to a delightfully unpredictable season. On Tuesday, the Mets return to the playoffs for the first time in four years, very much ahead of schedule.
Then again, “ahead of schedule” is pretty much the story of David Stearns’s life. When the Milwaukee Brewers hired him, in late 2015, Stearns was 30 years old, making him the youngest GM in major league baseball (and younger than a dozen of Milwaukee’s players). He moved quickly, turning over half the roster before the start of the 2016 season. Within three years Stearns had the Brewers, playing in one of MLB’s smallest markets, in the playoffs. He pulled off some savvy trades, including for premier outfielder Christian Yelich, and landed some significant free agents, including outfielder Lorenzo Cain. But Stearns’s signature became finding under-the-radar, bargain players who contributed key pieces to the larger puzzle, players he and his staff had identified through advanced analytics plus a dose of old-school scouting.
Stearns before the Mets’ turnaround season.
Photo: Kim Klement Neitzel/USA TODAY Sports/Reuters
Stearns grew up a Mets fan on the Upper East Side. Born in 1985, he has no first-hand memory of the Mets’ last World Series win, in 1986. Instead, the adolescent Stearns loved Kevin Elster and Mike Piazza and became intimately familiar with Mets weirdness and heartbreak, including their loss to the Yankees in the 2000 Subway Series and their relinquishing of a seven-game lead to miss the 2007 playoffs. Then there was the time Mr. Met flipped off angry fans.
None of which dissuaded Stearns from pursuing his dream to someday run a big-league franchise. (His father, who worked as a senior executive at UBS Securities and Lehman Brothers, wrote a book titled Winning Smart After Losing Big, which seems like heavy-handed foreshadowing.) Stearns’s rise has followed a now-familiar path to modern GM-hood: an elite education plus an immersion in the data-heavy approach to building teams applied most successfully by Theo Epstein with the Red Sox and Cubs and by Andrew Friedman with the Rays and Dodgers. Stearns went to high school at Columbia Prep and then college at Harvard, where he covered sports for the Crimson. He spent one college summer as an intern with the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets single-A minor league team, where his duties included power-washing stadium bathrooms after games and occasionally donning the team’s Sandy the Seagull mascot costume. He returned to the Mets after college, in 2008, for a somewhat more elevated internship in the baseball operations department, impressing his bosses so much they argued for hiring Stearns and other interns full-time — only to be told the team didn’t have the money to expand the department. Nevertheless, “You knew David was going to be a GM someday,” says Adam Fisher, his supervisor back then.
Stearns spent the next three years at MLB’s Manhattan headquarters, mostly doing research for labor negotiations. He also helped prepare Sandy Alderson, then an advisor to the baseball commissioner, for an interview to become Mets general manager. Next came stops as an assistant GM with the Cleveland (then) Indians and, crucially, the Houston Astros. Stearns was part of the front office that steered the Astros through the ugly but effective strategy of tanking — losing as many games as possible to improve a team’s position in baseball’s amateur draft — and then applying pioneering data analysis to player development. It paid off in 2017 when the Astros beat the Dodgers in the World Series.
That Astros championship was later tainted by a sign-stealing scandal, but Stearns had left for Milwaukee two years earlier to become general manager. He didn’t need to tank to revive the Brewers. “David is an incredible listener, and he’s able to digest so many different inputs and distill those down into a way that makes sense and ultimately yields a quality decision,” says Matt Arnold, who Stearns hired as an assistant in Milwaukee, and who eventually replaced Stearns as the Brewers GM.
For all his success identifying undervalued assets, however, Stearns’s run in Milwaukee ended with a miscalculation of human chemistry. He had sound statistical and financial arguments for trading away star closer Josh Hader in 2022, but the move soured some of the Brewers’ remaining players, and a promising season went south. Afterward Stearns, citing burnout, downshifted to a job as a team advisor. “There was some awkwardness with ownership in Milwaukee. You hire this totally unproven young guy, and you nail it. He does a great job, everything’s going great. And then he kind of indicates he doesn’t want to do it anymore,” a high-ranking baseball executive says. “And then it was a very poorly kept secret that the Mets wanted to hire him.”
It took more than a year, until Stearns’s contract officially expired, but Cohen got his man. Stearns quickly replaced manager Buck Showalter with Carlos Mendoza, but the off-season was characterized by the big moves the Mets didn’t make. They only pursued one high-dollar free agent, pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, losing out on him to the Dodgers. The new mantra was “sustainability,” which translated into trying to stockpile more young talent in the minor league system. But Stearns acquired low-risk, high-reward major-league starters in Luis Severino and Sean Manaea, and both have delivered. Other low-profile pickups (Iglesias, who was out of pro baseball in 2023; catcher Luis Torrens; outfielder Tyrone Taylor; reliever Phil Maton) also proved valuable to the late-summer turnaround. “Something David has said to me over the years,” the baseball executive told me, “is that the baseball season requires contributions from so many players that you don’t win with your best players, but if your 16th through 25th players are better than other teams’ guys.”
Iglesias and Torrens, in particular, have added positive energy in the Mets clubhouse — the opposite of what happened when Stearns traded away Hader in Milwaukee. “The bottom line is, if Iglesias or anyone else wasn’t producing on the field, he wouldn’t still be here,” Mets bench coach John Gibbons says. “But Stearnsy understands there’s more to it than just a number. You know, the human side of it.”
Maybe the way things ended for Stearns and the Brewers reinforced the importance of those intangibles. Through the highs and lows of the Mets season he has tried to model steadiness and patience, qualities that have often been in short supply in the organization’s dysfunctional recent past. As things unraveled during the Mets messy final week, Stearns was a calming presence. Lindor told The Athletic that in a meeting the general manager reminded the anxious Mets there was no need to try too hard, saying, “You don’t have to be someone else.” Stearns’s stoicism, though, sometimes earns him good-natured grief. “He’s thoughtful, sober, almost robotic in his ability to be very rational about everything,” a longtime Stearns friend says. “Even when you see him laugh, it feels like somebody pressed the laugh button in his back. But in the end, that’s his strength as an executive.”
That kind of sangfroid is necessary when running a team like the Mets. But it seems to have extended to the rest of the franchise, too. The Mets didn’t simply win five more games than even their rough internal projection this season: the organization and its players showed a newfound depth and resilience, especially in exorcising their Atlanta demons on Monday. Maybe there really is something different — already — about the Stearns Era.
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