THERE’S A NEW MR. MET TO RULE TEAM
Cohen reaches agreement to buy Mets, at last
Steve Cohen’s decade-long pursuit of the Mets is overover. He has liberated the team from the Wilpons.
“I am excited to have reached an agreement with the Wilpon and Katz families to purchase the New York Mets,” Cohen said in a statement.
The hedge fund billionaire, soon to be MLB’s richest owner, will reportedly own 95% of the team, with the Wilpon and Katz families owning the remaining 5%.
The deal values the Mets at around $2.4 billion. Cohen still needs to get approval from 23 of the 30 MLB owners in order to take over the team; that could happen as soon as November. He’s expected to get those votes.
Cohen currently owns 8% of the team, and the deal does not include SNY.
This is the second time a Cohen-Mets sale has been officially announced, and the third time Cohen has tried to buy the team. In December 2019, the Mets said Cohen would be “increasing his investment” over a five-year period, with the Wilpons still in control until 2025. That deal fell through in February of this year after Cohen walked away from the Wilpons’ desire to control the team and its regional sports network. At the time, it was reported that octogenarians Saul Katz and Fred Wilpon wanted out, while Fred’s son, Jeff, wanted to keep control of the team.
The Wilpon-Katz group first bought into the Mets in 1980, when they bought 5% of the team and Nelson Doubleday took over at an 80% share. Fred Wilpon then bumped up his share to 50% in 1986, sharing the team with the Doubledays until 2002, when he bought them out for $135 million. The Mets were then valued at around $400 million.
Incredibly, the coronavirus pandemic only put a tiny dent in what Cohen was willing to pay for the Mets. The 2019 deal valued the Mets at $2.6 billion, just a hair more than the new deal.
Cohen defeated a group fronted by Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez at an open auction, despite a full-court political and media press by Rodriguez. Politicians pushed for the A-Rod group, and the former Yankee practically begged the other MLB owners to favor him in exchange for his support for a salary cap.
There are serious concerns about Cohen, and the allies of the Rodriguez/Lopez group highlighted them at every turn. Cohen made his net worth of more than $10 billion running SAC Capital, a firm that he wholly owned. The firm pleaded guilty to insider trading in 2013. While the government tried to get Cohen a lifetime ban from money management, the firm only ended up paying a $1.8 billion fine. Cohen personally settled with the government in 2016.
His new firm, Point72 Asset Management, was sued for gender discrimination in 2018.
“It seems that wherever Cohen goes and whatever he touches, controversy and corruption follow in short order,” Queens state senator Jessica Ramos wrote in the Daily News this summer.
But despite A-Rod’s best attempts to sway MLB owners to pick him, money was always going to win, and Cohen simply had the most of it. As the Daily News’ Bill Madden wrote over and over: A-Rod did not have enough cash to buy and run the team. Cohen did.
Cash flow has been a Mets problem over the last decade of the Wilpon era, which was a cash-strapped embarrassment right up to the end. The Mets have been deep in debt since at least their ill-fated investments with Bernie Madoff. The team loses money and is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, with the exact amount depending on the report.
Cohen has been attempting to buy a baseball team for years. He bought 4% of the Mets for $20 million in 2012, meaning the value of the team has somehow increased fivefold in the eight years since. In 2011, the Long Island native tried to buy 49% of the Mets and then tried to buy the Dodgers and Padres the next year.