Rival exec on Mets’ offseason plans: ‘They’re not messing around’

When the Mets dealt Max Scherzer , Justin Verlander and a slew of other key players ahead of the Aug. 1 trade deadline, they seemed to be giving up on their hopes of contending for a title.

Hiring David Stearns , from a small market team in the Brewers , to be the team’s president of baseball operations seemed to back that up — this is the guy who traded Josh Hader to the Padres amid a playoff race in 2022, right?

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A baseball executive isn’t buying it — “They’re not messing around,” he said, via Joel Sherman of The New York Post . “I don’t think they have the stomach for a year or two to get the ship turned around.”

In Stearns, the Mets have a fearless actor in the front office, who isn’t afraid of making tough decisions for the betterment of the organization in the long run. That aforementioned Hader trade got Milwaukee Esteury Ruiz , who Stearns then flipped in a deal with the Braves for William Contreras , who hit .289 with a .825 OPS, earning him his first career All-Star nod, a Silver Slugger award and NL MVP consideration in 2023.

Contreras, 25, earned $739,000 last season and won’t be a free agent until at least 2028. Meanwhile, Hader, 29, earned $14.1 million last season and is a free agent now — talk about bargain shopping.

That’s not all. The Mets continue to be linked to the game’s top free agents Yoshinobu Yamamoto , who was recently awarded Japan’s equivalent of the MVP for the third consecutive season, and two-way phenom Shohei Ohtani . Combined, these players are expected to receive north of $700 million in contracts — no team in a rebuild is willing to spend that kind of money.

That’s the power of having MLB’s richest owner Steve Cohen at your disposal, like Stearns does.

An agent who has discussed players with Stearns in the past put it this way to Sherman of The Post: “The priority explained to us was they are going to try to win as many games as possible [in 2024] without impacting the long-term goal of being a sustained championship contender.”

That’s a possible impact Stearns and Cohen could have on this organization moving forward.