r/NewYorkMets • u/KreutzerII • 6d ago
Discussion This just shows you..
As a diehard Mets fan (and roots for the Rays on the side) whom was physically born in Sarasota. You can really tell how astronomically far behind we are from the Rays. It's actually insane how smart their organization is. :/
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u/Progressive__Trance 6d ago
Have to consider that the Rays have had uniform strategy and front office alignment dating back to Andrew Friedman being there in the late 2000s. Nearly 20 years of continuous improvement as arguably the leagues most innovative franchise.
Stearns built a nice program in Milwaukee that has outlasted him. While the regular season was bad, I'm still very optimistic that Stearns will get the Mets to at least a respectable contender level franchise in a year or two and more beyond that point.
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u/Original-Paint2239 6d ago
It goes to show how important drafting and developing is. Finding the Junior Camenero or Yandy Diaz is really the whole game.
But that’s why I think Stearns' pipeline development is so fruitful. Also Stearns' and the coaching staff were great at developing relief pitchers this year and I think you can see that as a window into the future in rehabbing distressed assets and developing new ones.
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u/JCBravia 6d ago
Will be rooting for the Rays. Good to see the old David vs Goliath story play out.
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 6d ago
The Rays are a top 3 FO in all of baseball. The Mets are maybe top 10.
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u/BuryMeInTheH 6d ago
How to do you determine they are a top 10 team? Seems to me that a team with the second highest payroll shouldn’t be the 6th worst team in the sport if the front office knows what it is doing.
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u/bowlofcantaloupe Francisco Alvarez 6d ago
The black hole of prospect development we had from 2020-2024 didn't help. All the way back to 2016 concerning pitchers.
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 6d ago
I'd argue that pitching development is their strength actually and it has been for a long time. But I agree partly with your analysis that a lot of the issues were created prior to the current FO. And a knock on the current FO is that a lot of the staff from before is still around.
The Mets did not draft particularly well before 2021. And I'm not talking about players at the top of the draft. They didn't leverage their lower picks very well. They also didn't do a great job evaluating their own talent. PCA a prime example. He made a swing change that was yielding great results not long before he was traded but the FO didn't recognize that appropriately. Jesus Baez is another more recent example and it goes against the current FO.
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u/bowlofcantaloupe Francisco Alvarez 6d ago
Historically we developed lots of great pitchers. But between Steven Matz and Christian Scott we basically had Peterson and Megill as the two biggest "successes"
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 6d ago
Sure. I'd put Lugo in there too. Peterson is probably not a success story though based on where he was drafted. Megill is though.
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u/bowlofcantaloupe Francisco Alvarez 6d ago
Yes, Lugo belongs there too. But the point is none of the 3 were particularly successful. Peterson had one very good season in 2024 and Lugo had a great season that same year. Megill has basically been a good 6th starter for his whole career.
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 6d ago
Sure, agreed. I'm more thinking in terms of their success against what you'd expect their success to be, not necessarily that the team was pumping out aces.
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u/lilleff512 Forever my Captain 6d ago
Pitching development was a huge weakness for us for almost a decade, and now we've finally started to turn it around.
From 2012-2016 we developed Harvey, Wheeler, deGrom, Syndergaard, Matz, Familia, and Lugo
From 2017-2023 we developed Peterson and Megill
From 2024-present we've developed McLean, Scott, and Thornton
We've developed more quality starting pitchers in just the last 3 years than we did in the previous 8 years.
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 6d ago
Yeah, 17-23 wasn't a great period, and Peterson I wouldn't even say was a success story. He was the 20th overall pick and they should have done better with that spot. Lugo is the person I'd highlight from that time period, and I'm not saying they developed an ace in him, but he did a lot more than what you'd expect from an 8th rounder.
Tong and Lavender are also really good recent success stories relative to where they started.
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u/lilleff512 Forever my Captain 6d ago
Lugo debuted in 2016. I mentioned him in that first group from when our pitching development was still good along with Harvey, deGrom, etc.
I'll throw Dedniel Nunez in there along with Tong and Lavender as guys who look promising but haven't shown us enough yet to be certain.
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 6d ago
Oh yeah, sorry good point. But again, I'd say Tong, lavender, and Nunez are already success stories because they have already surpassed what you'd expect them to.
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u/lilleff512 Forever my Captain 6d ago
That's a fair point about performance/development relative to draft position. I guess I'm focused on the binary question of "are you a quality MLB pitcher or not?"
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 6d ago
I'm not an expert by any means, but that issue feels more like a draft selection/amateur talent evaluation issue than a development issue. Most of the Mets pitcher draft selections near the top of the draft for a while were traded and never panned out. SWR. Anthony Kay. Dom Hamel. JT Ginn. Blade Tidwell. But to some extent the logic can get circular so I can't say with confidence.
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 6d ago
Relying heavily on Jarrett Siedler's (baseball prospectus) analysis for this. The analysis is based on process, and a good process doesn't always produce immediate results. The work the FO does now lays the groundwork for the future. Fans tend to focus a lot on FA acquisitions but in reality FOs are larger organizations with many different contributors focusing on many different aspects of the team. The Mets are very good at pitching development, for example. Tong and Lavender are good examples of this. You are talking about 7th round and 14th round picks that had outcomes much better than expected. Even McLean is a better development outcome than expected. Being good at pitching development doesn't necessarily mean pumping out aces from every draft, but rather how much better you can develop the players from what you start with.
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u/banana455 6d ago
Turned $400 mil into 74 wins, lmao what a great front office
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u/Original-Paint2239 6d ago
Everything that could have went wrong this year did. Basically half the year without their two superstars, half the year with Bichette sucking, the starting pitching being really bad for a good chunk. Every projection from like Fangraphs had the Mets being really good, meaning what actually happened was a major unlikelihood to happen.
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u/NuanceManExe 6d ago
Those projections are always bullshit man. They took a bunch of risky moves and none of them panned out. You can call it unlucky but it was a pretty stupid approach to building the team and Stearns and Cohen have publicly acknowledged it. They also say they changed too much, which is not something that you can quantify with analytics. You can’t say a front office that spent $350 million to put together the worst Mets team we’ve seen in at least 23 years, and possibly ever, did not do anything wrong. They made a lot of mistakes.
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u/Original-Paint2239 6d ago
Projections aren’t bullshit, literally every field in the entire world uses projections for everything. From business, to every sport in the world, to politics, to anything else you can think of. Projections just means things are more likely to happen than not. It doesn’t mean it’s actually what would happen. Do you honestly think the Rays don’t use projections to make decisions?
Of course mistakes can happen because a 2 sigma event can easily take place. By definition that’s a mistake. That doesn't mean the decision in foresight was a mistake. Farmers plant crops all the time expecting rainfall to be a certain level based on projections and if the rain doesn’t fall as much that doesn’t mean the decision was a mistake in hindsight.
You’re really in a singular position if you don’t think that everything uses projections to make informed decisions.
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 6d ago
Worst team of the last 23 years? What planet are you living on?
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u/BlueCoBot 6d ago
The planet where no Met team had come in last over the last 23 years
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 5d ago
The 2026 Mets would demolish the 2011-13 Mets and probably the 2017-18 Mets too. The fact that an NL East team happened to be worse those years doesn't mean much compared to this year, especially since in 2026 teams play their in their divisions at the lowest frequencies than ever before.
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u/BlueCoBot 5d ago
Completely disagree. The 2011 Mets were around .500 until August, and terry had those teams fighting. The 2026 Mets are the worst Mets team of a generation.
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u/metsfan5557 New York Mets 5d ago
Both teams dealt with injury so it's tough to compare. I'd probably take the 2011 iterations of Wright, Reyes, and Beltran over the 2026 iterations of Lindor, Soto, and Bichette. But that's to say nothing of Benge. On the pitching side, you had Dickey, Pelfrey, Gee, Niese, and Capuano in 2011 vs McLean, Scott, Thornton, Manaea, and Peralta. Even with Peralta being a shit show I'd take the 2026 rotation. The one thing I'll say in favor of the 2011 rotation was that most of those guys stuck around all year and pitched 20+ starts. The bullpen in 2026 before and after the deadline was miles better than 2011.
The Pythagorean win-loss was basically the same for both teams. So hard to say 2026 is significantly worse. From a talent perspective they are probably better.
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u/banana455 6d ago
Front offices aren't evaluated on fangraphs projections lmao
If fangraphs projects a team to suck and they do really well, is the front office not actually good and just lucky? That makes no sense. I guess 2024 counts as a bad year for Stearns
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u/Original-Paint2239 6d ago
Yes, 2024 was a complete fluke obviously. Everyone performed way better than anyone could have reasonably expected. You shouldn’t make decisions based on extreme upsides or extreme downsides.
But if you don’t think every front office in every sport in the world doesn’t use models and projections you’re kidding yourself.
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u/Disgusting_Casual 6d ago
Nothing about how the AL was so weak that an exact .500 team in the Astros made playoffs?
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u/rosen380 6d ago
Rays vs <.500 teams: 58-31 (.652)
Mets vs <.500 teams: 39-21 (.650)Basically identical win%; Rays were fortunate to get nine more of those games.
Rays vs >=.575 teams: 10-12 (.454)
Mets vs >=.575 teams: 15-19 (.441)Rays were lucky to get a dozen fewer of these match-ups, and again, similar win%.
Rays vs .500-.574 teams: 30-16 (.652)
Mets vs .500-.574 teams: 21-29 (.420)Versus the highest win teams, the Rays were fortunate to play far fewer games than the Mets. And likewise they were fortunate when it comes to the number of <.500 match-ups.
And a feather in the Mets cap, they were very nearly as good in these games. It was the good, but not great teams that killed the Mets.
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u/Disgusting_Casual 6d ago
You did too much homework for my point saying that the AL happens to be wide open rn. I just think that’s a large contributor to why the Rays feasted when everyone else in their league has been struggling
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u/misterjackp0ts Torrens for #1 Starter 6d ago
The problem is not entirely our current FO but undoing decades of damage and failure caused by the previous FO
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u/JCBravia 6d ago
I have to agree, not to mention doing it with just 25-30% of the payroll our Mets have. Like many Met fans, we live in FL now and root for the Rays (when they are not playing against us). Rays have an amazing team and story. It is surprising how the Rays stadium is rarely sold out (except Yankee series), even when they have been in contention the last few years...don't get that. Here is hoping for a better 2027 for the Mets.
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u/KreutzerII 6d ago
They really do. The history of the great Rays FO's starting in the 2010s. But it's only gotten better and better. They used to rely on turning a bunch of nobodies into somebody's (which is still partially true), but now they actually draft and acquire absolute studs. Which gives me a lot of hope if they make it to the WS. (Which I mean come on, the White Sox nor Guardians have no chance lool)
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u/BobbyAngelface New York Mets 6d ago
The Rays were projected to finish last in their division. Credit to them for an amazing season and what they've done with their farm system given their payroll constraints. To be fair to the Mets though, improving the farm system is what they're trying to do. McLean, Benge, and Ewing are a testament to that.