MILWAUKEE — With the Brewers on the brink of elimination Wednesday afternoon, the two architects of the franchise’s resurgence chatted behind the batting cage. But one of them was wearing a Mets quarter-zip now, and standing beside his new boss, Steve Cohen. David Stearns, the Manhattanite who grew up a Mets fan, would tell you this Wild Card Series is a homecoming of sorts for Flushing’s first-ever president of baseball operations (a title Cohen created for his arrival last October).
But we see it more as a revenge tour, as Stearns was pretty much held captive in Milwaukee after he stepped down from running the Brewers into an advisory role, with owner Mark Attanasio blocking him from Cohen’s early recruitment efforts. Attanasio was certainly entitled to keep Stearns through the length of his contract, even though he already had turned over the front-office keys to his protege Matt Arnold. But it didn’t feel like just business — more like gamesmanship, as Attanasio’s small-market Brewers didn’t want to do the new hedge-fund titan on the block any favors with his recently purchased mega-market Mets.
Consider this Wild Card Series, in Attanasio’s retractable-dome backyard, Exhibit A. As Stearns’ former employer, Attanasio is wise enough to know that this day was inevitable once his baseball-ops whiz kid got scooped up by another team. Stearns had engineered the greatest run in Brewers’ history during his tenure, with a franchise-record four straight playo.