When members of his and rival front offices describe David Stearns, they often use the word “disciplined.”
He has his models, and he believes in them. He is circumspect, but not reactionary. He does not want to give up on his own players too quickly. In the best of baseball times, such patience is a virtue.
But these are not the best of times for the Mets, nor for Stearns. His 2026 Mets currently look like one of the more financially inefficient rosters in major league history, so ineffective that owner Steve Cohen spent part of July trying to dispel questions about his president of baseball operations’ job security.
So that Stearns stuck to his plan – a patient, traditional deadline approach centered on trading assets for prospects regardless of major league need – will eventually be viewed as hard-nosed or hard-headed. He did not address any of the Mets’ many 2027 needs – starting pitching, a better offensive and defensive infield, depth -- as he traded away eight major leaguers ahead of Monday’s deadline. But that, he said, was not his goal.
“I think [this] allows us to strengthen the overall quality of talent in our organization, and whether that’s these players directly impact our major league team in the future – which I think many of them will – or also having players that allow you to go out and acquire other players who impact your major league team,” Stearns said. “The players we have acquired, the prospects we have acquired, the young talent we have acquired in totality gives us the chance to do that.”
The Mets focused their deadline efforts on trading expiring contracts, though they also traded two players who were under team control beyond this year, set-up man Luke Weaver and veteran Huascar Brazoban. Brazoban, 36, yielded a 6-foot-9 righty named Gabe Davis who played with Nolan McLean and Carson Benge at Oklahoma State and a righty reliever named Zach Franklin from the Chicago White Sox. Weaver, who might have been the best reliever available at the deadline by 2026 performance, netted the Mets infield prospect Sammy Stafura from the Pittsburgh Pirates, though they had to pay down part of Weaver’s contract to get him.
“Really tough decisions there,” Stearns said of trading players who could have helped his bullpen next year. “Not straightforward. Had a lot of internal discussion and debate. Ultimately, the returns we were able to get we thought made sense, were in the best interest of the organization, recognizing that at this time of year you’re often able to get really good talent back for relief pitching. We understand that we’re going to have to go out and acquire relievers in the offseason in different ways to get our bullpen to where we expect it to be in 2027.”
Given Brazoban’s age and the fact that Weaver struggled so much in 2025 that the Yankees felt they could not rely on him in October, it is not difficult to see why the Mets decided to sell high on both. And while some opposing evaluators were surprised that the Mets had to pay part of Weaver’s 2027 salary to obtain Stafura – ranked No. 9 in the Pirates system by MLB Pipeline – he will vault into the Mets’ top five prospects almost immediately, and Stearns suggested the die-hard Mets fan could have a higher ceiling than others believe.
“He’s got tremendous defensive ability. He’s a very good baserunner. Can impact the game in a variety of different ways, help you win ballgames in a variety of different ways, and clearly has power as well,” Stearns said of Stafura, who grew up in Westchester County. “So when you begin to talk about a power-hitting infielder who we believe can play shortstop at a high level, that’s a player with a pretty high ceiling.”
The highest ceiling in the Mets’ deadline class probably belongs to Jefferson Rojas, who they plucked from the Cubs in exchange for Clay Holmes and Tyrone Taylor. Rojas, who MLB Pipeline ranked as the Cubs’ second-best prospect prior to the deal, will likely be the Mets’ highest-ranked prospect when the evaluators release their updated rankings. At 21 years old, with an .800 OPS in Double-A, he looks like a staple of Mets infields to come.
But prospects are notoriously fickle, so it will take time to determine whether Stearns’s hunt for the best available talent will help the Mets turn into the annual contenders Cohen hoped they would be by now. Other teams experiencing disappointing years approached their deadlines differently.
The Toronto Blue Jays, for example, managed to sell off expiring contracts of players like Kevin Gausman and Daulton Varsho while also trading for controllable starters Jose Soriano and Spencer Arrighetti of the Angels and Astros, respectively. Toronto maximized its expiring contracts, but they also took advantage of teams willing to trade pitching to bolster their 2026 chances. After jettisoning Holmes, David Peterson, and Freddy Peralta from a rotation that was never deep enough when it included them, Stearns said he considered a similar approach.
“It absolutely did [appeal to us],” he said. We explored a number of those types of players and ultimately just couldn’t line up on acquisition cost, but it is something that we explored.”
Perhaps another head of baseball operations under similar scrutiny would have operated differently. For example: After years of criticism that he was not aggressive enough in pursuing stars, Red Sox president of baseball operations Craig Breslow tossed several top prospects to the Orioles to beat the Yankees to Adley Rutschman and traded former first-round pick Marcelo Mayer to the San Francisco Giants for top reliever Erik Miller. Maybe it will yield a pennant in what once looked like a lost season. Maybe it won’t.
Either way, Stearns will provide a fascinating counterpoint: Whether stubborn, steadfast, or somewhere in between, only time will tell.
Eric Samulski
