Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns was blunt, forthcoming, and reflective on Monday, speaking at Citi Field a day after New York's season ended in abject failure at the hands of the Marlins in Miami.
"I'm the architect of the team," Stearns said at the beginning of his news conference. "I'm responsible for it."
And while taking responsibility, a lot of focus was spent on the Mets' failure to prevent runs, which was a two-pronged issue caused by the pitching and defense. Stearns also touched on the offense, but much more of his time was spent alluding to what went wrong with the starting rotation — and how to fix things.
"From a roster construction perspective, on the run-prevention side of the ball, we didn't do a good enough job of fortifying our team when we had injuries midseason," Stearns said. "Clearly, that was a point in our season where on the run-prevention side of things we went from a very good team to a team that wasn't good enough to maintain a sizable lead — not only in the division, but in the playoff chase.
"Our defense wasn't good enough, and that certainly contributed to our pitching challenges. And then offensively, we had a number of players who had really good years. But we failed to score the runs that we needed to score despite those really good years. You add all that up, and you get to a team that underachieved greatly. We know that. I certainly know that. And we're gonna work really hard to fix that going forward, learn from this, and do a heck of a lot better."
After storming out of the gates to a 45-24 record in mid-June, things turned for the Mets.
Before getting injured, Griffin Canning and Tylor Megill had started to regress badly. Kodai Senga also suffered an injury, compounding the rotation issue since Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas were still out while rehabbing injuries suffered in spring training.
Faced with a rotation that was in disarray, the Mets were in a tough spot.
In the weeks after the injuries hit, New York utilized a handful of bullpen games and gave starts to pitchers like Paul Blackburn (they lost all four of his starts in June) and Blade Tidwell.
They also decided to not call Nolan McLean up at that point, even though he was performing in largely dominant fashion for Triple-A Syracuse.
While Stearns said the team should've done more over the summer to address the issue, he did not regret not adding to the rotation at the trade deadline.
"I think holistically as I look at our pitching staff, we needed to do more over the course of the season," Stearns said. "That is very clear. What we were faced at at the deadline? I think our fanbase would be perhaps even more upset if we had made some of those moves. But the entirety of our run-prevention unit was not good enough this year."
Above, Stearns seemed to be referencing the reported prices for the starting pitchers who weren't moved, which was relatively outrageous.
Regarding how the Mets will fix the rotation for 2026 and beyond, Stearns wouldn't rule out anything and noted that adding a top starter via free agency or trade is possible. But he stressed the need to develop top of the rotation starters, which the team might have just done with McLean.
Stearns also touched on what he learned during the season, and cited a need to be more proactive and aggressive.
"I think on a number of levels there are areas where we can probably be a little bit more proactive," he said. "And I can be a little bit more proactive. I think some of these lessons we're still investigating and still fully understanding various aspects of our team. But there are clearly times in the season, times over the offseason, where I can be a little bit more proactive."
He later noted:
"We are making the best decisions we possibly can with the information we have at the moment. I made the best judgments I did — clearly some of them didn't work out. Now we try to learn and move forward."
In addition to the struggles of the starting pitchers who were healthy, the Mets were left in a precarious spot when it came to depth. And the bullpen was impacted because the starters didn't pitch deep enough into games.
Neither issue was lost on Stearns.
"We need more innings out of our starting staff," he said. "There's no question about that. We were on the edge for the first two and a half months this year, where we were getting five-plus innings per start pretty consistently. That worked because it was happening every night. The minute you then get your 2 1/3 inning start, you get into trouble. That got us into trouble this year — when we stopped getting the consistent five-plus inning starts, and occasionally there was the really short start. And then the next start was 5 1/3 innings. That gets you into trouble."
Stearns added:
"Yeah, we were hit by injuries. But every team is hit by injuries, and we have to be able to have sufficient pitching depth to overcome that. And clearly when we got hit by injuries in the middle of the season, we did not have the depth to overcome that."
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