David Stearns has plenty to sort through this winter, but one of the Mets’ trickiest decisions may not be about a trade or a free-agent splash. It’s whether to start locking up their young core now, or keep playing the waiting game.
The logic behind early extensions is easy to see. A player gets life-changing money before arbitration and free agency can squeeze the market.
A team gets budget control, avoids ugly salary battles, and can sometimes buy out a year or two of free agency. That model has become especially popular around the league, with the Braves making it a habit and young players such as Kevin McGonigle, Konnor Griffin and Cooper Pratt getting long-term deals early in their careers.
The Mets, though, have mostly stayed away from that approach. They haven’t extended a homegrown player before free agency since Jeff McNeil’s four-year deal. Billy Eppler did make Pete Alonso a seven-year offer worth more than $150 million, but Alonso turned it down.
Now Stearns has a group that fits the extension conversation. Carson Benge, A.J. Ewing, Nolan McLean and Christian Scott all sit in that window where a team can try to get ahead of the market.
For the Mets, the appeal is obvious. Benge and McLean, in particular, could become star-level players, and if that happens, their prices could climb fast once arbitration enters the picture.
The top end of that process gets expensive in a hurry. Juan Soto made $31 million in his final year of arbitration with the Yankees in 2024, and Tarik Skubal got $32 million this season.
That kind of escalation is exactly why teams like to strike early. It also helps a club like the Mets, where Steve Cohen has made it clear he does not want to keep paying the luxury tax forever. If Stearns believes players like Benge and McLean are going to be part of the roster into the early 2030s, a fixed number on their salaries would make future budgeting a lot cleaner.
But there’s another side to this, and the Mets know it well. Early extensions can look brilliant when they hit - Ronald Acuna Jr. is the poster child - but they can also go sideways fast. The Braves haven’t exactly gotten their money’s worth on Austin Riley’s 10-year, $212 million deal, and the Yankees moved on from Aaron Hicks’ seven-year, $70 million contract with more than two and a half years left on it in 2023.
The Mets might have already had some of these conversations if they had leaned harder into extensions before. Mark Vientos and Francisco Alvarez could have been candidates after their 2024 contributions. Instead, Vientos has fallen off badly enough to be a non-tender candidate this winter, while Alvarez has stalled because of injuries, defensive regression and inconsistent hitting approaches.
There’s also the bigger-picture issue hanging over all of this: the collective bargaining agreement. A possible salary cap would change the economic rules in a major way, and that makes timing everything. With Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto already on long-term deals, and the possibility of another major commitment to Skubal, Stearns has every reason to wait until the next financial setup is clear before adding more guarantees.
That doesn’t mean the Mets should ignore the idea forever. It just means the order matters. If the rules are about to change, it would be poor business to hand out a deal now that leaves the club squeezed later, especially if it meant overpaying someone like Ewing or Benge and then not having enough flexibility for McLean.
Once the uncertainty is gone, though, the case for acting early gets stronger. The Mets have leaned on a year-to-year approach because their spending power gives them the option to outbid the market when they need to keep someone.
That strategy has had mixed results. It worked in the winter of 2022 when they held onto Edwin Diaz and Brandon Nimmo, though Nimmo’s deal was still an overpay in years.
And once a player reaches the open market, the Mets lose control quickly - all it takes is one team to fall in love and push the price beyond what the Mets want to pay, as happened with Alonso in Baltimore last winter.
So the question isn’t really whether extensions make sense in a vacuum. They do.
It’s whether the Mets are ready to start using them as a real team-building tool again, instead of waiting until the market forces their hand. Once the CBA picture is settled, there’s a strong argument that they should.
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