Steve Cohen

The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal is warning the last-place Mets against the kind of knee-jerk reaction that could make things significantly worse.

In a recent episode of “Fair Territory,” Rosenthal delivered a pointed warning to anyone pushing for Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns’ head: “Be careful what you wish for.”

“Steve Cohen has invested a lot in David Stearns, signed him to a huge contract. That was the guy they wanted all along,” Rosenthal said in a clip shared on X. “So we’ll see how this all plays out going forward. Stearns clearly is going to have to make better decisions.”

That’s not a throwaway line. It’s a reminder of a structural problem that has quietly plagued this franchise since Steve Cohen took over. The revolving door at the top of the Mets’ baseball operations could be viewed as an obstacle to building a winning organization.

Every time a new head of baseball operations comes in, they bring their own philosophies, their own scouts, their own preferred analytics frameworks, their own relationships with agents and other front offices.

The institutional knowledge that takes years to build is essentially wiped clean. Contracts signed under a previous regime suddenly don’t fit the new vision. Players developed under one set of principles are now being evaluated by a completely different one.

The Mets have been here before — multiple times under Cohen alone. And each reset has come with a fresh wave of optimism, followed by the same structural instability.

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Stearns was supposed to be the answer to all of that. He was brought in with enormous fanfare, a massive contract and the full backing of ownership. He was the guy.

Rosenthal isn’t giving Stearns a free pass here. The acknowledgment is clear that things haven’t gone according to plan.

But his broader point cuts to the heart of how winning organizations are actually built — through patience, continuity, and a willingness to let a process develop before pulling the plug.

Firing a front office executive doesn’t fix a broken roster overnight. It doesn’t undo bad contracts or solve a flawed scouting pipeline. What it does do is reset the clock — again — and force the franchise to spend another two or three years just getting back to the starting line.

There’s a version of this where the Mets decide they’ve seen enough, make the move and find themselves in exactly the same position twelve months from now, only with a newer face taking the blame.

That’s not progress. That’s the illusion of progress.