Now, with a few pleasant baseball weeks between his Mets and the hardest days of this disappointing season, Steve Cohen is finally willing to name the problem.
"I can argue we might have taken too much risk as far as when you think about all the changes that we made," Cohen said in the Mets dugout Wednesday morning in his first press scrum since the team fired its manager and sold assets at the deadline. "Whenever there are significant changes, sometimes it takes a while to integrate. Those are the things I’m looking at to understand exactly what we can do better."
Until Wednesday, Cohen had been conspicuously careful when discussing his team’s struggles. For one, he only spoke about those struggles on the record one time since firing manager Carlos Mendoza – and he did so on a podcast with The New York Post reporters he knows well. When he did address them, he offered support for his president of baseball operations David Stearns, rather than any specific diagnosis of what Stearns might have gotten wrong.
But Wednesday morning, with his major league team playing better, his minor league system rejuvenated somewhat by a trade deadline sell-off, and his commitment to Stearns made explicit, Cohen was willing to share the findings of his private autopsy.
"I just think when you add new players, when you add a coaching staff, maybe adding players with an injury history – when you add risk upon risk upon risk…it doesn’t mean it had to turn out bad," Cohen said. "It just means you have dispersion of results and maybe the possibility of an undesirable result is more of a possibility because of the risk you’ve taken. I equate it to running a portfolio: the more risk you take in running a portfolio, yeah, you can have major upside. But also, your downside can be bigger. So you can have bigger variance in results, and I think that’s what happened here."
The risks Stearns and the Mets took in 2026 have been well-documented. One of them – signing oft-injured Jorge Polanco to a two-year deal to play first base when he had barely ever played there before – loomed particularly large as Cohen spoke Wednesday morning: a few moments earlier, manager Andy Green announced that Polanco would undergo season-ending surgery on the left ankle that has limited him all season. In a season full of risks that yielded suboptimal outcomes, Polanco’s situation yielded a true worst case.
Other risks already look less damning than they did a few months ago. Building an offseason around Bo Bichette, who had never played in New York before, seemed like a risk that didn’t pay off – until he adjusted. For more than a month now, he has looked like the player the Mets thought they were getting.
Cohen also said he did not think changing the whole coaching staff was a miscalculation in itself – and indeed, the Mets' young pitchers and hitters certainly seem to have been able to make adjustments, even if veteran starters like David Peterson and Freddy Peralta struggled to adjust to new tutelage.
"I look at it as in the whole. I look at it as individual decisions that make perfect sense," Cohen said when asked about all the coaching changes. "But when you add it all up, you get into a different realm of did we take too much risk? It’s kind of looking at it from a top-down perspective."
From a top-down perspective, Cohen said, he is more optimistic now than when he expressed concern about 2027 to the New York Post in July. He pointed to the impact Francisco Lindor has had on the team’s energy and success since returning from the injured list. He lamented that Juan Soto and Lindor have not been healthy at the same time, since that combination might have been able to lift this team out of its slump sooner. And he did not speak like a man who believes widespread change is necessary.
In fact, other than affirming that the Mets are taking Green at his word about returning to the front office and are therefore planning to conduct a managerial search this winter, Cohen did not seem desperate for more drastic measures – one of many early indications from Mets decision-makers that this winter might not bring as much roster turnover as one might expect after such an uninspiring season.
Cohen, for example, offered another hint: he is becoming increasingly skeptical of free agency to fill roster holes.
"What are the areas to make the team better? Farm system. Trades. Staff. And free agency. Free agency is a negative expected value," Cohen said. "…If you have to fill in holes, you have to fill in holes, too. So you have to be tactical. But every time you dip into free agency, you just know that’s a tough place to be."
Free agency is a particularly difficult place to be this winter, when a looming lockout and weak free agent class (outside of Tarik Skubal) means the Mets likely weren’t going to find many answers there anyway. The Mets need a starter or two, and perhaps the market has enough of those that free agency can yield them. For what it’s worth, on Aug. 19, people familiar with the Mets' thinking say it's too early to characterize their interest in Skubal, though they would not rule out a situation in which Cohen pushes Stearns to leave his comfort zone and pursue a long-term deal for the right kind of starting pitcher.
But when it comes to the Mets’ lineup, the answers cannot come until they decide what their questions are – and those are yet to be determined. For one, they do not know whether Bichette will opt out of his deal. They also do not know what they can count on from Polanco, other than that he is under contract for $21 million and will therefore be part of their plans in some form.
They could choose to pursue a slugging first baseman, and a person familiar with their efforts confirmed reports that they have scouted Japanese star Teruaki Sato this year. Almost every contender has. And if bringing players to New York for the first time constitutes a risk, bringing a player across the world for the first time certainly seems like an even bigger one.
But they could also choose to work with what they have, particularly if Bichette returns. In that scenario, their two least productive offensive positions would be second base and first base. Marcus Semien is under contract for two more years and a combined $46 million, so the path of least resistance would be to let him start the season at second base until one of the many infield prospects in the higher levels of the Mets system (Mitch Voit, Jefferson Rojas, Emilien Pitre, etc.) is ready to take a shot there.
At first base, Jared Young continues to prove he is a capable platoon bat against right-handed pitching, meaning he could pair with Polanco in a modified platoon or rotation to keep Polanco healthy. If Young holds steady and improves and Polanco does anything compared to his career numbers, one could envision that being a serviceable combination.
Still, the word "if" features prominently in almost all those scenarios. If these Mets had played better early this season, they would be fighting for a playoff spot right now. If so many risks hadn’t yielded so many worse-than-expected outcomes, Cohen would not be giving this autopsy at all. The question he and Stearns and the Mets front office must answer between now and the start of the offseason is this: Is the bigger risk to their trajectory doing too much to a roster that struggled with wholesale change once already, or is the biggest risk not doing enough?
COVERS INTEL: Jackson Chourio has maintained a .538 SLG, .905 OPS, .269 ISO while genertating a 55.6% hard-hit rate and 16.7% barrel rate over his last 30 at-bats versus right-handed pitching. 
Kurt Helin
