David Stearns was closing in on a nearly continuous hour of talking the early afternoon of Oct. 2, so perhaps it was equal parts excitement and exhaustion that led the Mets’ newest employee to forget that while his story is a unique one, it’s not unprecedented.
“I feel very fortunate and privileged to be here right now,” Stearns said near the end of the press conference introducing him as the Mets’ president of baseball operations. “I understand this doesn’t happen. You don’t grow up a rabid fan of a team and then one day get to stand here at a press conference talking about it.
“I understand this doesn’t happen. So the fact that it’s happened, I recognize how incredible that is.”
Indeed, Sterns is the first lifelong fan of the Mets to end up as the team’s head baseball decision-maker. But this year marks the 20th anniversary of the Red Sox snapping their epic championship drought under general manager Theo Epstein — a Boston native and childhood Red Sox fan who went to an Ivy League school and wrote for its newspaper before becoming a front office executive.
So the Manhattan-born Stearns — or, as he was known in the Harvard Crimson sports section, David H. Stearns — and the Mets are indeed following a well-worn path. But this trek comes with much higher stakes for Stearns and the Mets than for Epstein and the Red Sox when they named him general manager in November 2002.
Back then, the idea of non-baseball lifers running teams based on numbers and analytics was more of a curiosity. Athletics general manager Billy Beane was admired for his ability to do more with less, but “Moneyball,” the genre-changing book about his methods, was more than six months away from being published.
Epstein, whom the Red Sox turned to only after Beane turned them down, was the youngest general manager in history at the time of his hiring and one of just two Ivy League-trained general managers along with Cleveland’s Mark Shapiro (Princeton). His peers included 13 men who’d played professionally before moving into the front office.
The Moneyball-ization of baseball likely would have continued if Epstein failed to build a champion in Boston, but without the championships in 2004 and 2007, Epstein wouldn’t have led the revolution. He wouldn’t have been wooed by new Cubs owner Tom Ricketts in 2011 to oversee the rebuild that yielded another iconic, drought-busting championship in 2016 and cemented Epstein’s Hall of Fame case.
He wouldn’t have laid the groundwork for a 2024 season in which there are eight Ivy Leaguers serving as a general manager or president of baseball operations, along with another half-dozen lead executives who went to Ivy-caliber New England schools (Peter Bendix, Ben Cherington, Derek Falvey, Jed Hoyer and Farhan Zaidi, the latter of whom got a doctorate in economics from Cal-Berkeley after graduating from MIT) or took corporate paths to their current gigs (Andrew Friedman worked at Bear Stearns and MidMark Capital). Only eight current general managers played professionally (including Mike Hazen, Craig Breslow and Chris Young, all of whom also went to Ivy schools).
And without those titles in 2004 and 2007, Epstein certainly wouldn’t have made it possible for Stearns — whose four playoff teams in Milwaukee combined to win just one postseason series — to be wooed from afar by Steve Cohen for three years before finally signing a five-year contract worth $50 million, a deal nearly three times as lucrative as Epstein’s first contract with the Cubs. He wouldn’t have made it possible for Stearns to arrive fully empowered and able to assign predecessor Billy Eppler the dirty work task of firing Buck Showalter, a manager with a borderline Hall of Fame resume. Twenty-one years ago, Epstein had to inherit Grady Little, whose managerial career consisted entirely of the 2002 season.
Despite Boston’s manic obsession with the Red Sox, Epstein also stepped into a less pressurized job, one in which the framework for success was already built. The Red Sox won 93 games in 2002 and the championship team two years later included seven players drafted or acquired by Dan Duquette, Epstein’s predecessor as a full-time general manager.
In addition, a sense of intrigue surrounded Epstein’s hiring — not the desperation that accompanies Stearns’ arrival. Counting Sandy Alderson, Cohen has already cycled through four baseball decision-makers, including Epstein disciples Jared Porter and Zack Scott, both of whom are likely done in baseball following their scandal-plagued exits.
Despite his poor job of assembling last year’s disappointing team. Eppler was expected to serve as Stearns’ top lieutenant, at least until he resigned three days after Stearns was hired and just as Major League Baseball began an investigation into the Mets placing players on the injured list with phantom injuries under his watch. Eppler is suspended for the 2024 season.
So all Stearns has to do to be better than anyone else Cohen hired is not destroy his career. Yet what will Cohen do and where will he turn if Stearns just fails in a baseball sense?
Cohen spoke optimistically this spring about the Mets’ farm system finally “…starting to look stacked” thanks to the work of those who preceded Stearns. But the Mets have a long way to go and little margin for error in their attempts to chase down the Braves and Dodgers, both of whom have player development systems that have been fruitful for decades.
Epstein arrived in Boston as the Yankees grew top-heavy. Among the Yankees’ top-12 players in WAR in 2003 per Baseball-Reference, the only ones who weren’t either imported or older than 30 were Derek Jeter and Alfonso Soriano. Epstein also had the 50-round draft at his disposal, not the downsized 20-round draft Stearns will oversee.
And outside of drafting Corbin Burnes in the fourth round in 2016, Stearns’ player development record with the Brewers was spotty at best. Last fall, the Brewers were the only team for whom New York Post columnist Joel Sherman couldn’t construct a 26-man roster made up entirely of active players originally drafted or signed by Milwaukee.
To be fair, phenom outfielder Jackson Chourio, signed out of Venezuela in 2021, is expected to make his big league debut tomorrow and is one of six top-10 prospects, per Baseball America, signed or drafted by Stearns. So future Brewers teams may still have Stearns’ imprint on them, even as he begins the long-awaited task of constructing the first consistent Mets contender of this century.
“We have to create our own blueprint here,” Stearns said Oct. 2. “And I think we will.”
For the Mets’ sake, it’d better look like the one authored by Epstein.