Laura Albanese

There has not been a lot of stability in this franchise with regards to personnel.

He's also extremely well-liked, both within the media.

You honestly can't find a nicer guy, genuinely, and among a lot of his teammates and especially, especially with the fans.

So to see him being traded off

And kind of just leaving a question mark in the outfield for Marcus Simeon, who absolutely a defensively just elite second baseman, but also one who struggled a lot at the plate last year.

So while David Stearns has mentioned time and time again, run prevention, run prevention, run prevention, you also have what seems like your 432nd

second baseman on this roster and you are getting rid of your outfielder and now you have more questions.

So this is kind of an interesting thing because that's when you kind of saw it was a little bit of the canary in the coal mine.

David Stearns is betting on himself because right now all the moves that he's making,

They're primed to making persona non grata over in Flushing, not offering Pete Alonso a contract, maybe not communicating with Edwin Diaz, getting rid of Brandon Nimmo.

If you can't flip all these moves into a contender, a true contender who makes the playoffs and at the very least makes a deep run into the playoffs...

then people are going to be like, well, it was all for naught because we're giving you the keys to the kingdom right now.

You can do whatever you want.

You said in your postmortem that you were looking at the idea of blowing up the core.

And I don't think people expected him to blow up the core to this level.

So now that he's done that, you have to fill in the pieces.

The question is, how does he do that?

Because you look at some of the free agent options and yeah, there are some tantalizing pieces there, but it's also,

You know, do you give this gigantic contract to Kyle Tucker or Cody Bellinger or whatever?

Do you overpay in this situation?