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The Mets wanted Milwaukee with money. It’s not as easy as it sounds

Kodai Senga fell to 0-6 with a 10.08 ERA after another short outing against the Cubs. Jim McIsaac / Getty Images

NEW YORK — Baseball has a way of upending logical assumptions. When a leader shows he can win with a low-budget roster, then certainly he can win with a big-budget roster, too. More money, more winning, right?

“The benefit of this job is we have access to the entire player universe,” David Stearns, the president of baseball operations for the New York Mets, said Tuesday at Citi Field. “Anyone who’s playing baseball anywhere, we have the potential to acquire. That’s very different than some other markets and certainly where I came from.”

Stearns came from Milwaukee, where he built teams shrewdly and handed them to manager Craig Counsell, who usually steered them to the playoffs. The Mets poached Stearns from the Milwaukee Brewers in October 2023, a month before the Chicago Cubs did so with Counsell.

The Mets won a wild card in 2024, then missed the playoffs last season at 83-79. The Cubs went 83-79 to miss the playoffs in 2024, then won a wild card last season.

This year has been unkind to both. The Mets are buried in last place in the National League East. The Cubs recently played 10 series in a row without winning any. They have a better record than the Mets but no clear pathway to a pennant.

“You need to get contributions from all over your roster,” Counsell said Tuesday. “That’s what baseball shows you all the time. We can’t give the ball to LeBron James. In baseball, everybody’s got to share it.”

In Flushing, LeBron James translates to Juan Soto. The Mets would love to send Soto to the plate all game long. They have nobody else hitting much, and even Soto checked out early in Tuesday’s miserable 9-6 loss — he has tightness in the left side of his back and was gone after four innings.

The Mets entered the game with the NL’s second-worst offense, better than only the San Diego Padres, another big-money lineup gone bust. The Cubs don’t spend quite as much as the Mets or Padres, but their payroll still ranks among MLB’s top 10. Their highest-paid players, 32-year-old infielders Alex Bregman and Dansby Swanson, have hit well below their standards.

The Brewers don’t have these kinds of problems. They won with Stearns and Counsell in charge, and still win with Matt Arnold and Pat Murphy. They get the best from players such as Willy Adames, let desperate big-market teams (in Adames’ case, the San Francisco Giants) pay for the decline phase, and sell high to acquire or develop younger, cheaper, often more productive replacements.

It’s not that all players in their 30s are bad bets, but the exceptions tend to be future Hall of Famers and/or members of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The rest, invariably, end up limiting how the rest of the roster functions.

“If you’re building a good small-market team, you do have more optionality in terms of, like, ‘If this doesn’t work, we can do this,’” Counsell said. “When you’re committing resources to free agents, that’s your guy. But every team tries to build depth.”

The Cubs have won seven of their last 10 after bludgeoning Kodai Senga on Tuesday, but fate keeps depleting them; their starter, Edward Cabrera, left the game on a cart with a hamstring/adductor strain. At least Matthew Boyd will return Thursday, and strong fielding is a constant.

“I think good teams always feel like they always have an identity; that’s just a label we put on good teams,” Counsell said. “This team is the same team as last year, essentially: We play great defense. You can not be happy with our record, but we play great defense, and that was true last year as well.”

The Mets tried to bolster their defense in the fall by trading outfielder Brandon Nimmo to the Texas Rangers for Gold Glove second baseman Marcus Semien. But Semien, 35, has declined offensively in each of the last three seasons, and is signed through 2028 at an average of $25 million per year.

Bo Bichette, 28, should still be in his prime; that is why Stearns gave him $42 million per season after losing the Kyle Tucker bidding (could you imagine Tucker in New York?) to the Dodgers. Though Bichette had a .900 OPS in June before Tuesday, his strikeout rate is up, his walk rate is down, and his season on-base percentage is below .300.

“I think we’re going to look up at the end of the year and see a pretty good season for Bo,” Stearns said, though by then it might not matter.

Other offseason additions, center fielder Luis Robert Jr. and Opening Day first baseman Jorge Polanco, have been sidelined by injuries since April. Polanco’s Achilles problem has been especially vexing — “Some good days, not-so-good some others,” manager Carlos Mendoza said — but the Mets got what they paid for.

They dumped redoubtable first baseman Pete Alonso — who has played in every game for the Baltimore Orioles — and thought they had a bargain in Polanco at two years and $40 million. With Soto and Francisco Lindor under contract well into their 30s, the impulse for a short-term contract was understandable.