Mets' David Stearns says Pete Alonso deserves to see what the free-agent market could bring him
The New York Mets baseball team president David Stearns at a press conference at Citi Field, in Queens New York, on Wednesday, October 23, 2024 Credit: Newsday/Kendall Rodriguez
Two names hovered over David Stearns’ end-of-season news conference on Wednesday, one spoken of often and one never mentioned: Pete Alonso and Juan Soto.
What happens to those two pending free agents and whether the Mets sign both, one or neither will go a long way toward determining the makeup of the 2025 roster.
Stearns, the team’s president of baseball operations, answered questions for about 32 minutes at Citi Field, where World Series baseball would have been played next week had the Mets been able to overcome the Dodgers in the NLCS.
Instead, the Mets lost in six games. After a period of reflection about the wondrous season the Mets had, Stearns and owner Steve Cohen are beginning to formulate their offseason plans with about $180 million in expiring contracts coming off the books.
The first order of business: Whether to re-sign Alonso. The second: Whether the Mets can pry Soto away from the Yankees and any other suitors once the superstar is done playing in the World Series.
“We've got financial flexibility,” Stearns said. “It means that pretty much the entirety of the player universe is potentially accessible to us. That's an enormous opportunity. I envision us taking advantage of that opportunity and being aggressive in certain spaces.
“We also have to recognize that we want to set up our organizational pattern so that we can invest in free agency, invest where we think we need to, to complement the club on an annual basis. So we have a lot of money coming off the books. I would expect us to spend some of that, a good portion of that, to complement our team, to improve our team heading into next year. We're also not going to do anything that hamstrings us in future years and prevents us from continually adding, supplementing to our core.”
Stearns said one of the last people he spoke to before walking into the interview room was Alonso, who was at Citi Field presumably collecting his belongings before an uncertain offseason.
Stearns said the two did not talk contract, and in fact have never spoken “face-to-face” about Alonso’s free agency since Stearns joined the organization after the 2023 season.
“Pete's a great Met,” Stearns said. “He was right out there, right before I came in. I told him I was about to answer a lot of questions about him. He told me, ‘Good luck.’ He's a great Met. I hope we have him back. I think we both understand this is a process, and everyone's got their own interests, and Pete deserves to go out into the free-agent market and see what's out there and then ultimately make the best choice for him and his family.”
After the season ended on Sunday at Dodger Stadium, Alonso said: “I haven’t really thought that far. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. But I love this place. This place has been really special. This is all I’ve known. It’s been a blessing and an honor."
Stearns was hired in part to take the emotion out of decision-making. There’s no bigger Mets fan than Cohen, and one of the possibilities is that the owner will want to re-sign Alonso out of emotion rather than sound baseball judgment.
Stearns, though, seemed to reject that characterization.
“We're all emotional,” Stearns said. “There are emotion parts to me as well. We all want to do really well. It's really difficult to strip away all emotion as you do these things. Certainly, we try to implement processes that help us with that, that keep us honest. But Steve grew up a Met fan. I grew up a Met fan. That's always going to be a part of us.”
Stearns also said “pitching is a priority,” especially with three-fifths of the starting rotation potentially free agents in Luis Severino, Jose Quintana and Sean Manaea (who has an opt-out he is expected to use).
Stearns said he was still stung by the way the Mets’ season ended but was proud of how far the club went when it looked in May like it wasn’t going anywhere.
“I think we took a positive step for the organization,” he said “We believed all along that we had the ability to compete for a playoff spot, have an exciting September, October, and we did. So I think that that is certainly a positive. I think behind the scenes, under the hood, we put some things in place that will serve us well going forward. Still some work to do in those areas as well, and now it's our responsibility to keep it going.
“We enjoyed this run. Our fan base enjoyed this run. We have great memories from this run. It's also time for us to begin to move forward and see what we can do to build on this, to ensure we have the type of sustainable competitiveness, true sustainable competitiveness, that's eluded this organization for a long time.”
Anthony Rieber covers baseball, as well as the NFL, NBA and NHL. He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since July 5, 2004.
