Can the New-Look Mets Defy Decades of Hot Stove History?
Does winning the winter portend a disappointing season? After drastically reconstructing their roster, the New York Mets are trying to defy a bunch of bad precedents.
In 2000, the New York Mets won the National League pennant. In 2001, they won 82 games and missed the playoffs. Smarting from defeat, the franchise’s front office set out to win the subsequent offseason, with an eye toward returning to October in 2002. In short order, several staples of the Subway Series squad (Robin Ventura, Todd Zeile, Benny Agbayani, Lenny Harris, Glendon Rusch) were out. Several sluggers (Roberto Alomar, Mo Vaughn, Jeromy Burnitz), speedsters (Roger Cedeño), starting pitchers (Shawn Estes, Pedro Astacio, Jeff D’Amico), and setup men (David Weathers, Mark Guthrie) were in. “2002 Mets: Rebuilt to Go the Distance,” a New York Post headline (https://nypost.com/2002/04/01/2002-mets-rebuilt-to-go-the-distance/) proclaimed on Opening Day.
Instead, the Mets went 75-86 and finished last in the NL East. The aggressively reconstructed club, one columnist declared (https://www.newspapers.com/article/newsday-suffolk-edition/189927025/) , was “the most expensive flop in baseball.”
The legacy of that team—and others that had huge offseasons, only to fizzle in the following year—still hangs over the present-day Mets, who have overhauled their whole club after a late-season collapse (https://www.theringer.com/2025/09/30/mlb/new-york-mets-collapse-pete-alonso-david-stearns) (another Mets tradition (https://neilpaine.substack.com/p/the-mets-are-saving-themselves-and) ) left them 83-79, a tiebreaker win away from the postseason. Before New Year’s, president of baseball operations David Stearns bid goodbye to stalwarts Edwin Díaz, Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo, and Jeff McNeil, overturning the team’s identity (https://www.theringer.com/2025/12/19/mlb/new-york-mets-offseason-pete-alonso-edwin-diaz-brandon-nimmo-francisco-lindor) . He replaced the departed players, and pursued other upgrades, in the form of both bats (Bo Bichette, Luis Robert Jr., Jorge Polanco, Marcus Semien) and arms (Freddy Peralta, Devin Williams, Luke Weaver, Luis Garcia, Tobias Myers). Stearns has stayed busy: On Roster Resource’s offseason tracker, the Mets lead all teams in additions (https://www.fangraphs.com/roster-resource/offseason-tracker/mets?teamchange=add) and rank third in subtractions (https://www.fangraphs.com/roster-resource/offseason-tracker/mets?teamchange=sub) .
Sure enough, now that the transactions have slowed, the resulting roster seems strong. The Mets’ mostly new-look (https://www.fangraphs.com/roster-resource/depth-charts/mets) lineup and bullpen, plus Peralta’s presence atop the rotation, have sweetened tabloid headlines from December’s “Ya Gotta Bereave (https://nypost.com/cover/december-11-2025/) ” to January’s “Haul of a Job (https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/JANUARY24.BP_LCF.jpg?resize=1857,2048&quality=90&strip=all) .” Suddenly, everything’s coming up Mets—except for one nagging concern. (Not (https://www.theringer.com/2018/10/22/mlb/craig-kimbrel-boston-red-sox-los-angeles-dodgers-closer-blown-saves) counting (https://985thesportshub.com/2019/09/23/craig-kimbrel-has-been-a-disaster-in-chicago/) the (https://www.soxon35th.com/what-happened-to-craig-kimbrel-on-the-white-sox/amp/) lurking (https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2022/09/dodgers-remove-craig-kimbrel-from-closer-role.html) specter (https://fansided.com/posts/rob-thompson-finally-waves-white-flag-on-key-struggling-player-01hdc8xwsp2x) of (https://www.mlb.com/news/craig-kimbrel-designated-for-assignment-by-orioles) Craig (https://www.mlb.com/news/craig-kimbrel-designated-for-assignment-by-braves) Kimbrel (https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2026/01/mets-to-sign-craig-kimbrel-to-minor-league-deal.html) , of course.)
“All that is keeping me from really liking this Mets offseason is history,” Post columnist Joel Sherman wrote (https://nypost.com/2026/01/24/sports/inside-mets-star-studded-overhaul-that-comes-with-historical-caveat/) last week. “That generally the teams perceived as winning the winter so often follow by being among the biggest disappointments of the actual season.”
The Mets don’t have a clear-cut case to be MLB’s biggest winners of the winter—the Dodgers (https://www.theringer.com/2026/01/16/mlb/the-dodgers-are-breaking-baseball-again-kyle-tucker-record-contract) , Cubs, Orioles, and Red Sox, among others (https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/offseason/spending) , might like a word—but Sherman is right to sound a cautionary note. By taking a cleaver instead of a paring knife to what was a decent (albeit disappointing) team, the Mets have already strayed from the sport’s standard operating procedure. If their offseason strategy works, and the revamped roster wins more games than the old one did, they’ll have bucked baseball history to an even greater degree. While it’s hard to argue with the wisdom of getting good players, the past 125 years or so of hot stove history—and extreme team makeovers—have taught us that turnover tends to be bad.
To assess a team’s turnover rate from one season to the next, we can calculate the percentage of total playing time (as measured by plate appearances and batters faced) across the two campaigns accrued by players who were present in both seasons. This method of determining how much such clubs had in common accounts for all types of turnover: not only exports and imports, but also callups, injuries, and other promotions and demotions in role. When we run the numbers for all AL/NL teams (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eSWFMCc9RGa8MPZYMFjCWORo3aoyhii92q0Jo4M2mR0/edit?usp=sharing) dating back to 1898 (when Retrosheet’s NL box score data (https://www.retrosheet.org/) begins), a clear pattern appears.
The graph below shows the mean and median roster turnover rates for teams in various buckets of regular-season success, with winning percentages ranging from below .300 to above .650. In general, the higher a team’s winning percentage in Year 1, the lower its turnover rate tends to be.
Here's another illustration of the same trend. If we sort teams by turnover rate, from the lowest-turnover cohort of 0-9 percent to the highest-turnover cohort of greater than 60 percent, we see that the lower a team’s turnover rate, the higher its Year 1 winning percentage tends to be.
Teams with losing records in Year 1 have collectively recorded mean and median turnover rates of 32.4 percent and 31.8, respectively. Teams with winning records in Year 1 have collectively recorded mean and median turnover rates of 23.2 percent and 22.2 percent, respectively. This difference isn’t especially surprising. Losing teams have more work to do to get good, while winning teams have more incentive to stand pat. Both PR-wise and in terms of talent, losing teams face steep pressure to reshuffle their rosters. Winning teams often opt not to mess with success.
The Mets weren’t a bad team in 2025. Although they spectacularly flamed out of playoff position, they spent 178 days last season either leading the NL East or no worse than tied for the third wild card (disregarding tiebreakers). That 178-day tally—consisting of March 28, plus every day from April 5 on—equaled a record for a non-postseason team, which was set by the 2007 Mets, who held a seven-game division lead on September 12 but lost 12 of their last 17 games to cede the title to the Phillies.
Last year’s Mets missed the playoffs by such a narrow margin (after making (https://www.theringer.com/2024/10/11/mlb/new-york-mets-nlcs-francisco-lindor-pete-alonso-grimace) the playoffs by an equally narrow margin the previous year) that they could have convinced themselves they were a few tweaks away from fixing their flaws this winter. Another New York Post columnist, Jon Heyman, argued as much in December. In a piece entitled, “The Mets have blown it all up—and for what?”, Heyman wrote (https://nypost.com/2025/12/10/sports/the-mets-have-blown-it-all-up-and-for-what/) , “they’ve taken a sledgehammer to a roster that only needed a scalpel or two.”
Since the dust settled on the Mets’ major moves, Heyman has changed his tune (https://nypost.com/2026/01/22/sports/mets-stunning-six-day-revamp-was-over-a-year-in-the-making/) . But what can we conclude about the Mets based on how aggressively they’ve reshaped their roster?
It would seem to bode well for New York that the higher a team’s turnover rate, the better its winning percentage tends to be in Year 2 compared to Year 1. For example, teams with turnover rates above 60 percent tend to decline the next season by about 20 points. Teams with turnover rates below 10 percent tend to improve by about the same margin.
However, that’s purely a product of a confounding factor we already identified: As a group, terrible teams have high turnover rates, and great teams have low ones. In both directions, regression to the mean makes its influence felt. In general, bad teams tend to get better the next season and good teams tend to get worse, not just because of different turnover rates but because of better luck.
But what if we hold winning percentage constant? If we isolate the effect of turnover rate, independent of starting team quality, is there any good news for the Mets?
Again, going by historical comps, not really. I grouped all teams into 25-point buckets of winning percentage, then compared the higher-turnover half of teams to the lower-turnover half of teams within each bucket. (So, for instance, I limited the sample to teams with winning percentages between .300 and .325 in Year 1, sorted qualifying teams by turnover rate, and then compared the least stable half of those teams to the most stable half of those teams. Then I did the same for each group through the .625-.650 range.) In every bucket, the high-turnover teams tended to do worse in Year 2 than the low-turnover teams, relative to their records in Year 1.
In other words, given two teams with equivalent records in Year 1, the one with the lower turnover rate is usually a safer bet to compile a better record in Year 2—presumably because teams are skilled self-evaluators, and those that know they don’t need reinforcements are less likely to go get them. (Granted, some winning clubs become complacent (https://www.theringer.com/2019/03/20/mlb/red-sox-opening-day-lineup-bullpen-projections-world-series-winner) .) Plus, team-building tends to be a painstaking process, and it’s difficult to dramatically reconfigure a roster in a hurry and have those plans pay off.
In Alonso, Díaz, Nimmo, and McNeil, the Mets parted ways with four players who had continuous tenures of at least seven years with the team (though Díaz’s stint was only six seasons, because he missed 2023 after injuring his knee in the World Baseball Classic), and combined for almost 80 FanGraphs WAR as Mets. Although that sounds like a lot to lose all at once, exoduses on that order occur (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oGxdZpDJQAilENfLpvUJdgzS7nc7NqkR6z-yeds2Y3k/edit?usp=sharing) once or twice per season, on average. However, they’re more infrequent among winning teams, and even more rarely do significant departures from winners presage an improved winning percentage in the post-exodus season. That same maxim applies to turnover rates on rosters writ large.
The table below lists history’s highest-turnover teams, led by the infamous 1898-99 Cleveland Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1899ClevelandSpiders_season) :
AL/NL History’s Highest-Turnover Teams
Cleveland Spiders 1898 89.6% .544 .130 -.414
Philadelphia Athletics 1917 82.6% .359 .406 .047
St. Louis Cardinals 1898 82.3% .260 .550 .290
Boston Braves 1905 70.6% .331 .325 -.007
Atlanta Braves 2014 70.0% .488 .414 -.074
Boston Red Sox 1945 69.8% .461 .665 .204
Cleveland Blues 1901 69.1% .401 .507 .106
Baltimore Orioles 1954 68.4% .351 .370 .019
Oakland Athletics 1976 68.1% .540 .391 -.149
Philadelphia Phillies 1942 66.9% .278 .416 .137
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As one might imagine, special circumstances abound: wars, fire sales (https://www.si.com/mlb/athletics/onsi/news/12-days-that-shook-mlb-finley-sells-fingers-rudi-blue-only-to-be-overruled-by-kuhn) , strike seasons, and more. As for the teams with the lowest turnover rates—well, with few exceptions, they’re ancient history.
AL/NL History’s Lowest-Turnover Teams
Chicago White Sox 1904 1.7% .578 .605 .027
Baltimore Orioles 1969 1.8% .665 .676 .012
Pittsburgh Pirates 1971 2.3% .601 .613 .011
Philadelphia Athletics 1903 2.6% .556 .536 -.019
New York Yankees 1939 2.9% .710 .568 -.142
Boston Red Sox 1916 3.4% .597 .592 -.005
Chicago White Sox 1906 3.8% .618 .576 -.042
Philadelphia Phillies 1908 4.4% .539 .484 -.055
Chicago Cubs 1907 4.5% .712 .648 -.064
Oakland Athletics 1973 4.6% .580 .567 -.013
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What we’re really after, though, are possible precedents for these Mets. So let’s look at the highest turnover rates among teams with winning records in Year 1:
AL/NL History’s Highest-Turnover Teams With Winning Records in Year 1
Cleveland Spiders 1898 89.6% .544 .130 -.414
Oakland Athletics 1976 68.1% .540 .391 -.149
Brooklyn Dodgers 1902 66.9% .5
