Now that the remake is just about done — seemingly, anyway — David Stearns knows the real test comes from March until October.
But he stands by the moves he made this offseason — both the additions and subtractions — after an ugly 2025.
“We’re confident in this group,” the Mets president of baseball operations said Thursday on a Zoom call from Citi Field. “We think this group is gonna fit well together.”
There were plenty of questions as the offseason dragged on if that would be the case — especially in the infield.
Stearns added Bo Bichette, who — like Jorge Polanco — will be asked to play a new position after Stearns said one of his main goals of the offseason was to improve the team’s run prevention.
That means Bichette will be at third base and Polanco at first, even though they’ve been shortstops almost all of their professional careers.
“There’s no question we’re asking two guys to learn some new positions,” Stearns said. “We’re also asking two guys with very high baseball aptitude, [who are] good athletes and spent the majority of their careers at the shortstop position to learn new positions on the dirt.”
Stearns acknowledged: “There’s gonna be learning curves. We’re gonna make mistakes.”
But he added: “I also have a high degree of confidence that both those players are gonna figure it out and be able to play their positions at a pretty high level.”
And he also pointed to what he believed was the most important part of a defense’s construction.
“We look at what our defense looks like up the middle,’’ Stearns said of Francisco Lindor playing next to newly acquired Marcus Semien at second, with another defensive whiz, Luis Robert Jr., in center. “We really like what our defense looks like up the middle right now. … We’re clearly better in some key defensive positions up the middle.”
It’s all part of the changes Stearns sought to make after the Mets fell well short of the playoffs in what was supposed to be a strong season after reaching the NLCS in 2024 and signing Juan Soto away from the Yankees.
“As we got into the offseason and we reflected on our ’25 season, we made the determination we had to do better,’’ Stearns said. “We were not gonna run back the same group. And that has driven a large portion of our strategy to this point. We’re going to go into this year with, I think, a very good, talented group, but also a group that looks somewhat different. There’s gonna be a lot of guys in our clubhouse who really have no affiliation at all with what happened to us in ’25. And I think that’s healthy and I think that’s good for us.”
That includes some of the more recent moves, like trading for Freddy Peralta to boost the rotation, making improvements to the bullpen with Devin Williams and Luke Weaver after the offseason opened with letting Pete Alonso go without a fight, trading Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil, as well as losing out to the Dodgers for Edwin Díaz.
Despite his optimism with spring training just weeks away, Stearns declined to dip his toes in the prediction game and wasn’t ready to make any bold proclamations about his squad.
“We’ve got a really tough division,’’ Stearns said when asked if he thought the Mets had the best team in the NL East. “We’ve got some really good teams and some teams that are getting better. Until we win a division, we can’t claim we’re at the top. We’ve got to keep going. … We’ve still got work to do and we’re committed to doing it.”
