The Mets' 74-Win Autopsy Produced Two Hires and One Uncomfortable Question: Was the Overhaul Itself the Problem?
The Mets' 74-Win Autopsy Produced Two Hires and One Uncomfortable Question: Was the Overhaul Itself the Problem?
The Mets finished 2026 at 74-88, a .457 season that cost them nine wins off their 2025 total and flipped a plus-51 run differential into minus-32. Ownership's own verdict arrived in the days after: Steve Cohen said the club took "too much risk" with last winter's overhaul, the one that replaced the roster nucleus and installed an almost entirely new coaching staff. Now the last week has produced the first real answers about who cleans it up.
The week's news, briefly: Andy Green, who took over as interim manager, has the job permanently. Derek Falvey — formerly the Twins' president of baseball operations — has been hired as a senior advisor in baseball operations. And the club announced three coaching staff changes for 2027, two of them in the hitting department, with Mariano Duncan reportedly joining the staff to work with position players. Kevin Long and Cubs assistant John Mallee were both interviewed for hitting roles and, per reports, are no longer under consideration.
What it means. The Mets are not running it back, and they're not tearing it down. They're doing something harder: layering a second front-office voice over a structure that just failed, while promoting the manager who inherited the failure.
Green is the most interesting piece. He was widely expected to return to the front office after the season, and there was a genuine groundswell for him to stay in the dugout. He gets his chance on the strength of a September that looked nothing like the first five months — the Mets went 12-12 with a plus-20 run differential (134 scored, 114 allowed) and a 20-game window that showed a .254 average and .784 OPS against a season line of .240/.311/.704. Small sample, real improvement.
The roster, though, is where the autopsy gets uncomfortable. Francisco Lindor hit .225/.309/.732 across 105 games, down from .267/.346/.812 and 31 homers over 160 games in 2025. Marcus Semien posted a .620 OPS in 139 games, and the club is openly weighing alternatives at second base. Kodai Senga's 7.34 ERA over 61.1 innings — zero wins, more walks (41) than in any prior stretch — is the starkest data point of the whole failed winter.
The counterargument to "blow it up again": Juan Soto was a monster. In 111 games he hit .275/.393/.908 with 27 homers and sat in the 100th percentile in xwOBA, xOBP and xSLG, with xISO at the 99th — a 3.02 WAR season that was the best thing about the team. Nolan McLean (3.16 ERA, 179.2 innings, 194 strikeouts, 12 wins) looks like a rotation anchor. The bullpen's 2.99 relief ERA and 1.114 WHIP suggest the back end isn't the problem.
The problem is the middle. A 4.13 team ERA (18th) behind a lineup that struck out 1,283 times is a formula for a minus-32 differential, no matter how good the top two hitters are. Falvey's arrival alongside David Stearns, plus a reworked hitting department, is the club's bet that process can be fixed without another roster purge.
That bet comes due in 2027, and the list is long: a rotation that needs depth, a second base decision, a first base plan, and a bullpen to re-sort behind a manager now working without an interim tag. The Mets didn't lose 88 games because of bad luck. They lost them because the plan didn't hold. This week they changed the people responsible for making the next one hold — and kept the guy who managed through the mess.