3 familiar NY Mets roster mistakes David Stearns needs to avoid

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No baseball executive has a completely clean resume. There's a coffee stain or four on everyone's record. At some point, even the most clever front office personnel sliced their finger on the corner and dabbed a little bit of blood over their high school GPA. Newly appointed New York Mets President of Baseball Operations David Stearns has a few blunders he'd like to forget.

The Mets are no strangers to roster mistakes. With only one playoff win in the last 8 seasons, there have been plenty of errors with roster construction and the choices they’ve made to fill out the spots.

Stearns is no wizard. This doesn't mean he'll be stuck getting hit with repeating mistakes made by Billy Eppler or his predecessors. Knowing his recent Mets history will help him from quickly repeating some of those same trappings that hurt the team. We can only hope that this offseason and moving forward he’s smart enough to avoid repeating these ones that still hurt.

1) Letting the wrong free agents walk

One of the best recent moves the Mets made was trading for Chris Bassitt. Their mistake was letting him leave. Bassitt was a perfect Mets pitcher whose only smear was coming up short in his final starts for the team. Sadly, being the starting pitcher on their 2022 elimination game hasn't worn off even if he’d need to have been nearly perfect to overcome the one-hit performance his offense assisted with.

Still, the Mets should have kept him around. The ball club chose to go in a very different direction with their starting rotation. They replaced three of their free agents with three others. Only Max Scherzer and Carlos Carrasco, whose option was picked up for the 2023 season, slid over to the next year. Imagine if the Mets chose to keep Bassitt over Carrasco or free agent addition Jose Quintana.

It was probably never meant to be as the Mets instead went for cheaper contracts, bringing in Kodai Senga (awesome) and Quintana who looks much more expendable for the long-term outlook.

The Mets didn't give up a whole lot to get Bassitt so perhaps there wasn't the struggle to keep him longer to justify the deal. Either way, this may have been a case of the Mets ignoring the consistent numbers Bassitt had been posting for years at the risk of him becoming a payroll burden at the end of his contract.

Bassitt falls right there in line with Zack Wheeler and Daniel Murphy before him. Bassitt led the American League with 16 wins and 33 starts in 2023. His 3.60 ERA was only slightly higher than the 3.42 he had in his one year with the Mets. He went up against a league-high 826 different batters. On a team like the Mets with a whole lot of questions in the bullpen, Bassitt would have made a difference.

2) Not giving younger players a look when you need them

The most frustrating part of the last two years with the Mets was the cowardice with the young hitters. This insanity needs to end. All it would have taken was a look.

Let's first go back to when this mistake revealed itself. Unsatisfied with the DH situation in 2022, the Mets made a lot of terrible decisions to try fixing it. The worst was not giving more at-bats to players like Brett Baty, Francisco Alvarez, and Mark Vientos sooner. Instead, the Mets introduced us to the deplorable platoon of Daniel Vogelbach and Darin Ruf.

This same timid philosophy carried into 2023. It was Ronny Mauricio who was held back this year. And for whatever it's worth, none of the other Baby Mets were on the Opening Day roster even with clear openings to have a role. Each was only recalled due to injury or in Vientos' case, an attempt to spark a cold offense. It only worked for about a week.

There may not be a more obvious roster mistake than this because of how consistently consistent it repeated itself. An earlier promotion for any of the kids in either season might not have been the difference. However, holding them back failed to work, too.

Although none of the kids have looked especially great thus far in their major league careers, a couple of big games from them in 2022 could’ve led to a division win and a longer survival in the postseason. Let’s hope the Stearns-led Mets are at least willing to capture some lightning in a bottle with the youngsters when they have the room.

3) Incomplete bullpens are a chore to watch

Where does one begin with all of the bullpen mistakes made by the Mets this year? In fairness, it’s the toughest part of the roster to build. Losing Edwin Diaz before Opening Day only made it tougher. There wasn’t much they could do other than cross their fingers until the joints cracked.

That’s a fair defense of the way Eppler built the bullpen in 2023. The error he made was not already having enough bullets in relief. David Robertson, Adam Ottavino, and Brooks Raley were capable and proven. As they tried to round things out, the Opening Day relief corps looked weaker each rung down the depth chart.

Drew Smith deserved his spot on the roster and in some big situations. His performance did answer the question of whether or not a promotion to the later innings would make sense. It no longer does.

Facing plenty of adversity due to injury, missing Diaz was the only true big blow to the team. Was Bryce Montes de Oca going to change the outlook of the bullpen? Sam Coonrod? Elieser Hernandez?

It seems like the Mets were more determined to have optional relievers for the 2023 season and still somehow ended up with an Opening Day roster featuring non-optional veteran Tommy Hunter and out of options Stephen Nogosek. The logic was there. The Mets just failed to execute on the plan to have movable pieces they could ship back and forth from the minors. Stearns must know better, right?

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3 familiar Mets roster mistakes David Stearns must avoid

1) Letting the wrong free agents walk

2) Not giving younger players a look when you need them

3) Incomplete bullpens are a chore to watch

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