When New York Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns attempted to assemble the best possible roster for the 2025 season this winter, the top priority was signing outfielder Juan Soto. Next was the need to replenish the starting rotation and bolster the bullpen. Then, days before pitchers and catchers reported for spring training, the lineup received one final significant reinforcement when first baseman Pete Alonso re-signed.

Acquiring a player with a singing career on the side didn’t make the cut.

“No, that is not on the list,” Stearns said with a smile.

Stearns’ decision not to re-sign Jose Iglesias, the infielder behind the mic for the viral 2024 Mets anthem “OMG,” was attributed to creating more roster flexibility. But it also hammered home a reality: The scrappy 2024 Mets, authors of a magical summer in Queens, are a thing of the past. The 2025 Mets, who will report to Citi Field for their home opener Friday, have much of the same core but also some prominent new faces — and the new, outsized expectations that come with falling two wins short of the World Series, then signing Soto to the richest contract in professional sports history.

But there’s a question surrounding this year’s team that you can’t put a price tag on: Can these Mets rekindle the magic — the vibes, the memes, the feel-good underdog story — that seemed to come out of nowhere to help carry them to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series last season?

“Last year the culture was created,” Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor said. “It’s a matter of continuing it.”

For all the success Stearns has engineered — his small-market Milwaukee Brewers teams reached the postseason five times in eight seasons after he became the youngest general manager in history in 2015 — the 40-year-old Harvard grad, like the rest of his front office peers knows there’s no precise recipe for clubhouse chemistry. There is no culture projection system. No Vibes Above Replacement.

“Culture is very important,” Stearns said last weekend in the visiting dugout at Daikin Park before his club completed an opening-weekend series against the Houston Astros. “Culture is also very difficult to predict.”

Still, it seems the Mets’ 2024 season will be all but impossible to recreate.

There was Grimace, the purple McDonald’s blob who spontaneously became the franchise’s unofficial mascot after throwing out a first pitch in June. “OMG,” performed under Iglesias’ stage name, Candelita, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Latin Digital Songs chart, before a remix featuring Pitbull was released in October. Citi Field became a karaoke bar whenever Lindor stepped into the batter’s box with The Temptations’ “My Girl” as his walk-up song. Alonso unveiled a lucky pumpkin in October. They were gimmicks that might have felt forced if they hadn’t felt so right.

“I don’t know if what we did last year could be replicated because it was such a chaos-filled group,” Mets reliever Ryne Stanek said. “I don’t know if that’s replicable because there’s just too many things going on. I don’t know if that’s a sustainable model. But I think the expectation of winning is really important. I think establishing what we did last year and coming into this year where people are like, ‘Oh, no, that’s what we’re expecting to do,’ makes it different. It’s always a different vibe whenever you feel like you’re the hunter versus being the hunted.”

For the first two months last season, the Mets were terrible hunters. Lindor was relentlessly booed at Citi Field during another slow start. The bullpen got crushed. The losses piled up. The Mets began the season 0-5 and sunk to rock bottom on May 29 when reliever Jorge Lopez threw his glove into the stands during a 10-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers that dropped the team to 22-33.

That night, the Mets held a players-only meeting. From there, perhaps coincidentally, everything changed. The Mets won the next day, and 67 of their final 107 games.

This year, to avoid an early malaise and to better incorporate new faces like Soto and Opening Day starter Clay Holmes, players made it a point to hold meetings during spring training to lay a strong foundation.

“At the end of the day, we know who we are and that’s the beauty of our club,” Alonso said. “Not just who we are talent-wise, but who each individual is as a man and a personality. For us, our major, major strength is our collective identity as a unit.”

Organizationally, the Mets are attempting a dual-track makeover: Becoming perennial World Series contenders while not taking themselves too seriously.

The commemorative purple Grimace seat installed at Citi Field in September — Section 302, Row 6, Seat 12 in right field — remains there as part of a two-year contract. Last week, the franchise announced it will feature a New York-city themed “Five Borough” race at every home game — with a different mascot competing to represent each borough. For a third straight season, USA Today readers voted Citi Field — home of the rainbow cookie egg roll, among many other innovative treats — as having the best ballpark food in baseball.

In the clubhouse, their identity is evolving.

“I’m very much in the camp that you can’t force things,” Mets starter Sean Manaea said. “I mean, you can, but you don’t really end up with good results. And if you wait for things to happen organically, then sometimes it can take too long. So, there’s like a nudging of sorts. It’s like, ‘Let’s kind of come up with something, but not force it.’ So there’s a fine balance there and you just got to wait and see what happens.”

Stearns believes it starts with what the Mets can control: bringing positive energy every day and fostering a family atmosphere. It’s hard to quantify, but vibes undoubtedly helped fuel the Mets’ 2024 success. It’ll be a tough act to follow.

“It’s fluid,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “I like where guys are at as far as the team chemistry goes and things like that and the connections and the relationships. But it’ll continue to take some time. And winning helps, clearly.”

PHILADELPHIA — Shohei Ohtani threw a 26-pitch bullpen session Saturday before the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ 3-1 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies, another step toward his mound return.

Recovering from right elbow surgery on Sept. 19, 2023, the two-way star threw his second bullpen session since resuming his pitching ramp-up. He paused after his mound session on Feb. 25 to prepare for Opening Day as a hitter, then threw a bullpen on March 29.

He incorporated splitters Saturday in a session Dodgers manager Dave Roberts labeled as “positive.”

“It’s a week, but then there’s also the one in between, where he touches the mound on a Thursday,” Roberts said. “And I think it’s just more trying to keep him on a similar seven-day program, and what the schedule would look [like] going out, and build from there.”

When Ohtani is ready for game pitching, the Dodgers plan to use a six-man rotation.

A three-time MVP and four-time All-Star, Ohtani is 38-19 with a 3.01 ERA and 608 strikeouts in 481⅔ innings as a pitcher.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred says the torpedo bat is “absolutely good for baseball” after it rose to prominence last week following a battery of home runs by the New York Yankees.

“I believe that issues like the torpedo bat and the debate around it demonstrate the fact that baseball still occupies a unique place in our culture,” Manfred told The New York Times in a Q&A published Sunday, “because people get into a complete frenzy over something that’s really nothing at the end of the day. The bats comply with the rules.”

The Yankees hit nine home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers on March 29, and the use of the torpedo bat by multiple players drew some scrutiny.

But the bat, as Manfred noted, has been in use for a few years since then-Yankees coach and current Miami Marlins staffer Aaron Leanhardt helped develop it to bring more mass to the sweet spot. Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton was among the players to use the bat in 2024, and he said he plans to stick with it after he returns from injuries to both elbows.

“Players have actually been moving the sweet spot around in bats for years,” Manfred told the Times. “But it just demonstrates that something about the game is more important than is captured by television ratings or revenue or any of those things, when you have the discussions and debates about it.”

Last week, Yankees manager Aaron Boone defended the use of the torpedo bats, saying it’s an example of “just trying to be the best we can be.” A number of players and teams over the past week have ordered the bats, which comply under MLB’s relatively uncomplicated rules around bat shape.

Manfred hit on a number of other topics in his wide-ranging interview with the Times. The commissioner praised the test of robot umpires for calling balls and strikes during spring training and said he expects the system to be used in the majors in the near future, possibly even next season.

“It won’t be in 2025. It’d be in 2026,” Manfred said. “Here’s why I’m uncertain: We could go to the MLBPA and say we want to go in 2026. Given that’s a bargaining year, it would not be shocking for them to say: ‘Let’s deal with this in bargaining. Let’s wait.'”

Manfred also reiterated his desire to see MLB expansion, saying he hopes to have “at least picked the cities” by the time he retires as commissioner in 2029.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.