NY Mets Monday Morning GM: 5 decisions that’ll make or break the team in 2026

One decision can make or break you. Sometimes they fly completely under your radar. Missing an earlier train can have you seated next to the love of your life on the next one. A squirrel dropping a large acorn can have a ripple effect through the universe. You step on the pebble barefoot, suffer an injury, and suddenly you’re out for the entire 2026 New York Mets season.

Back off if you’re going to bet that’s how the Mets lose a player this year. That’s mine!

Beyond those decisions made by squirrels, there are ones we see in plain sight made by the Mets this offseason that’ll have consequences one way or the other. Good or bad, all five of these have a chance to make this a successful year or snap it in half.

1) Firing Jeremy Hefner and going with Justin Willard

How much of a difference does a pitching coach really make? We’re about to get a better idea in 2026. The decision to move on from Jeremy Hefner was significant yet not unwarranted. The choice to hire Justin Willard will push the Mets in a new direction.

Factually, the difference for the Mets in 2025 came down to one game. A different opinion from Hefner may have altered the entire course of the season. Better coaching could’ve changed a single pitch and resulted in a much different conclusion.

You should never blame an individual coach for an entire team’s struggles or the group of players he oversees. Nonetheless, if there was ever a team to move in a new direction with the pitching coach, the end of the 2025 season was it.

The Mets seem to be more system oriented rather than going with the gut, especially with the pitching. They’re at the forefront of analysis with their pitching lab. So, as much as you can argue the coaches themselves don’t bring as much value as the numbers, something as minor as catching a pitcher tipping or not can make a lot of difference.

The pitching ultimately broke the Mets in 2025. If Willard is unable to get more out of many of the returning players, there’s little chance we’ll see things go much differently.