Expectations and reality for the 2026 Mets
Back in 2023, we saw that fWAR accounted for around 97-98% of the team’s actual wins for the 2022 and 2023 campaigns. Not perfect, but pretty darn good. Here in 2026, the Mets are 29th in the majors with 4.4 fWAR from their hitters and are eighth (!) with a 9.7 fWAR from their pitchers. That’s a little over 14 wins over replacement. A full-season’s worth of replacement level is 47.6 wins. With 53.7% of the season played, that’s 25.6 replacement wins. You add 25.6 and 14.1 and you get 39.7 wins, while the Mets have 36. Not as good as what we saw in 2022 and 2023 but still solid.
The Mets didn’t set out to create a 36-51 team. We’ve all seen the under-performance and we’ve all seen the injuries. What we haven’t seen is what the front office expected to see with the team they put together. What might that team have looked like?
Let’s look at the actual fWAR results in 2025 for the top players on the Dodgers and Mets. We’ll look at all of the players for both teams to amass at least 1.0 fWAR. Here’s how it played out a year ago:
LAD – 9.4, 5.0, 4.2, 4.1, 3.9, 3.4, 2.9, 2.5, 2.1, 1.9, 1.7, 1.7, 1.6, 1.5, 1.3, 1.2, 1.0 = 49.4
NYM – 6.3, 5.8, 3.6, 3.1, 3.0, 2.3, 2.1, 2.0, 1.9, 1.8, 1.6, 1.5, 1.4, 1.2 = 37.6
The 2025 Dodgers amassed 11.8 additional fWAR from players who contributed at least 1.0 fWAR than the Mets. Last year, the Dodgers finished with 10 more wins than the Mets. There are 17 players here listed for the Dodgers and 14 for the Mets. If we added the next three players for the Mets, we would have been closer to the actual win difference between the two clubs. But this exercise does not require perfection.
The Dodgers have a huge advantage with Shohei Ohtani, who contributes both at the bat and on the mound. Just about every team needs to make up that advantage Ohtani gives the Dodgers elsewhere. It seems safe to say that the Mets hoped to add more players into that 2-3 WAR class, as well as a few more at the bottom. And they tried to do this while letting productive players – you know who they are – leave.
So, let’s see the team that the Mets entered the year with and put their 2025 fWAR numbers into it and see what happens
6.3 – Francisco Lindor
5.8 – Juan Soto
3.8 – Bo Bichette
3.6 – Freddy Peralta
3.1 – David Peterson
2.6 – Jorge Polanco
2.3 – Brett Baty
2.1 – Marcus Semien
1.9 – Clay Holmes
1.8 – Francisco Alvarez
1.6 – Luis Torrens
1.4 – Kodai Senga
1.4 – Devin Williams
1.3 – Luis Robert Jr.
1.2 – Nolan McLean
That’s 15 players for a 40.2 fWAR. That’s an improvement over what they received in 2025 and they likely hoped that both Carson Benge and Luke Weaver would be above a 1.0 fWAR, too. Sure, maybe they didn’t expect Baty and Peterson to match last year’s results. Yet they likely expected better things from Robert and McLean.
Let’s see what they’ve actually received. With the season about 54% complete, let’s include all of the players to amass 0.6 fWAR:
2.6 – Soto
1.8 – McLean
1.4 – Benge
1.2 – Holmes
1.2 – Peralta
1.1 – Weaver
1.0 – Bichette
0.9 – Torrens
0.9 – A.J. Ewing
0.8 – Alvarez
0.8 – Sean Manaea
0.8 – Huascar Brazoban
0.7 - Lindor
0.7 – Peterson
0.7 – Williams
0.7 – Christian Scott
That’s a total of 17.3 fWAR and we know that (so far) fWAR is too aggressive in regards to actual results for the 2026 Mets. There are not enough top-end results, which really puts the pressure on the bottom-tier players to come thru. And that’s a losing proposition, in my estimation, if you want to have a winning record, much less make the playoffs.
There are only seven players listed above that are on pace to finish with a league-average (2.0) or better fWAR. And four of those players are trade candidates if the Mets get aggressive at the deadline.
It’s very fair to wonder if the Mets will be able to crack 25 fWAR at the end of the year from their players with at least 1.0 in the category. Maybe they don’t get carried away with trades and Lindor and Manaea have more productive second halves and they finish with 30 fWAR from this group. That’s still a sub-.500 club.
It’s all gone horribly wrong and we need to be honest about how best to fix this in 2027 and beyond.
Months ago I suggested a Houston Astros tear down and rebuild when they struggled with the new additions not panning out. In theory Stearns trades might have worked had the new players just hit and produced runs. Then we could have accepted their advanced bat on ball skills versus the power they gave up, and even ignored the lack of run prevention at the infield corner positions. The core of this team includes rookies Benge and Ewing, along with vets Soto, Lindor and Alvarez, who is certainly a player when healthy. That’s it. Poor depth, not quite ready prospects, and questionable new coaching has taken this team from a contender to a bottom feeder. And, the players they really need to move have tough contracts for other teams to take on, without the Mets swallowing big portions. Still shocked at how far they have fallen so fast.
Dawid, enjoy your comments, you should be writing for this blog!
"To defeat a healthy Dodgers club featuring Ohtani, Yamamoto, Glasnow, Snell, Betts, Freeman, Smith, Edman, Hernández, Hernández, Muncy, Pages, Sasaki, veteran relievers with championship experience, productive rookies, and one of baseball's strongest farm systems, perhaps difficult decisions regarding the existing Mets core after 2025 were unavoidable."
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Personally, I tend to focus primarily on identifying elite players. I also like listening to people like Brian on concurrent strategies.
That said, in my experience, I have rarely seen championship teams sustain success without enough elite talent: physical gifts, work ethic, mental processes, visualization, the ability not to dwell on past failures, and the discipline to keep improving.
Management also has to do more than simply bring the same team back one year older. It has to work to lower the average age, because after players win their first championship, motivation can change. As players age, injury risk also rises. Even without a major injury history, the risk increases over time.
That is why teams need to keep adding new elite players with some of those same intangibles — players who can offset reduced hunger for a second ring, higher injury risk, and the reality that every other club is trying to knock them off.
Recent Dodgers teams often add two or three new elite players after a championship. Looking at organizations that repeat or return to the World Series within a few years, that pattern appears frequently. The Dodgers use players who may be replaced to acquire prospects. They draft well, develop well, and trade prospects for prospects.
Operating in Southern California, where baseball is virtually a 12-month sport, with countless junior colleges, developmental programs, and late bloomers, gives the Dodgers advantages beyond payroll alone. The Diamondbacks, Padres, and Angels benefit from that environment as well.
Today, according to one major publication, the Dodgers have two of the top 11 prospects in baseball and three of the top 19. The Mets have Jonah Tong at No. 82 as their lone Top 100 prospect.
But that also raises a fair question about David Stearns. He may not have built a contender yet, but he also may not have inherited one. With only two drafts, an underdeveloped farm system, an aging major-league core, and pressure to remain competitive immediately, he may have been trying to solve problems that had been years in the making.
If Stearns concluded that the Mets could not realistically win by committing five additional years to Nimmo and Alonso while also carrying McNeil and Díaz, then some of his decisions become more understandable. That does not make the results good.
It does suggest that the criticism should be more precise.
Perhaps the problem is not that every individual decision failed. The problem may be that the roster required too many favorable outcomes at the same time. When several players underperformed or were injured, there was insufficient elite talent and insufficient depth to absorb those losses.
If that is the case, then perhaps the question is not whether Stearns has failed, but whether any general manager, given this inherited roster, two drafts, and this farm system, could reasonably have constructed a team capable of beating the Dodgers in a postseason series.
To defeat a healthy Dodgers club featuring Ohtani, Yamamoto, Glasnow, Snell, Betts, Freeman, Smith, Edman, Hernández, Hernández, Muncy, Pages, Sasaki, veteran relievers with championship experience, productive rookies, and one of baseball's strongest farm systems, perhaps difficult decisions regarding the existing Mets core after 2025 were unavoidable.
If so, then the organization may still be in the middle of a transition rather than at the end of one.