NY Mets Monday Morning GM: 3 lessons David Stearns can learn from last offseason

Is David Stearns the kind of person who can learn from his mistakes? We’re about to find out. The New York Mets President of Baseball Operations had a so-so offseason with the biggest moves being the most agreeable ones. Signing Juan Soto and Pete Alonso worked about as well as it could. A few moves further up his reputation alley, like turning Clay Holmes into a starter and taking a chance on Griffin Canning, also deserve some praise.

Stearns can’t pull a muscle patting himself on the back, though. Far too many misses coming from questionable calls should have him reevaluating what went wrong and why. He can start by looking at these errors and thinking of ways to prevent making them again.

1) Don’t overpay a mediocre pitcher too early

We call this the Frankie Montas mistake. Most of us hadn’t even flipped our calendars to December when the ink dried on his contract. Finalized on December 4, but agreed upon a few days earlier, the Mets couldn’t wait to make Montas a part of their 2025 plan.

Worst of all, Stearns willingly gave him a player option for a second season. It’s as if he wasn’t aware of what the team did with Omar Narvaez ahead of the 2023 campaign when he was mistakenly given the option.

We don’t need to dive too deeply into how badly Montas did with the Mets. Why scare children early when we can leave the more ghastly spooks for Halloween later this week? The problem with signing Montas so early and to the contract they gave him was the Mets helped set the market for players on his level. Coming off of a 4.84 ERA campaign, the oft-injured righty only improved slightly after going from the Cincinnati Reds to the Milwaukee Brewers. His ERA dropped only by about half a run with an increase in strikeouts being his most notable skill raised. But even with an impressive 11 K/9 rate, it came alongside a 4.55 ERA in Milwaukee.

Players of Montas’ ability aren’t an absolute “no” for the Mets whose POBO seems to have a preference for finding values like this. The greater problem was making him such an early addition when they could have probably held out and gotten a bargain elsewhere or at least been able to escape with one guaranteed season.