Here comes the hard part for Cohen, Mets
After perfect rollout, now big signings need to happen
The only way Steve Cohen could have generated more goodwill than he has so far is if he announced he was going to buy the Knicks and the Jets, too.
There has been no New York sports owner since George Steinbrenner got the Yankees from CBS nearly a half-century ago who has hit the ground running the way Cohen has. He has become a Twitter star, and joked about Bobby Bonilla Day, even threw some shade at Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez, the fun couple that thought they could tabloid their way to owning their very own baseball team. And he brought back Sandy Alderson, a great baseball man, and one of the handful of executives in Mets history who ever constructed a World Series roster, finally making the best deal (for Yoenis Cespedes) for the Mets since Frank Cashen was making them.
And the truth about Steinbrenner is that no one had any idea when he got the Yankees that he was going to reinvent the modern sports owner, and do it in the place Looie Carnesecca used to call Macy’s window. In fact, here is part of what Mr. Steinbrenner said, forty-eight years ago next month, upon purchasing the team:
“We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned. We’re not going to pretend we’re something we aren’t. I’ll stick to building ships.”
We found out pretty quickly how that worked out.
Before long everybody knew Steinbrenner was in town. It’s different with Cohen, who grew up a Mets fan and is now the richest owner in baseball history, one who comes in the door talking about the World Series, and making it clear that he won’t be afraid to spend money. For now, it’s obvious that he had Mets fans with hello.
And now comes the hard part for Cohen: He has to own.
Steve Cohen has to that guy, and start making the Mets something other than the Other Team in town, which is what they have mostly been since they last owned the town back in 1986, when they were was big a baseball attraction as the big city has ever seen, becoming the first city team to ever draw three million fans in attendance. Cohen, with Alderson running point for him, has to start walking all the talk that got Mets fans so excited, and so energized.
I asked Sandy Alderson the other day if Mets fans could be hopeful for a free agent by Christmas.
“Yes,” was his response.
Maybe he was only talking about a relief pitcher named Trevor May, who is a terrific upgrade in the Mets bullpen. But I don’t think he was, not with George Springer out there and J.T. Realmuto, the best catcher in the land, and Marcell Ozuna.
And maybe, just maybe, with DJ LeMahieu in play for the Mets every bit as much as he is in play for the Yankees now that he’s a free agent. Never in Yankees history has the team ever let its best player, LeMahieu in this case, walk away. Certainly, they have never even let one of their best players basically walk across the street. We’ll see what New York’s Other Team in baseball does about that.
Even though the Giants could see their record go to 4-8 today, whether they’re in first place in the NFC East or not, the Jets are still more than the Other Team in football around here than they’ve ever been, perhaps on their way to 0-16, something that has never happened before, even though they came close once under Rich Kotite. And when this season ends, and they start talking bravely about the future, their fans will still be stuck with Woody Johnson as their owner.
But Other Team-ness doesn’t have to be permanent. Mets fans can see what is happening with the Brooklyn Nets under Joe Tsai, with Sean Marks running point for Mr. Tsai. It was the Nets, and not the Knicks, who brought Kevin Durant to New York City, even
when we had read and heard for months before that about Durant being a mortal lock to go to the Knicks. Kyrie Irving came with him. Now James Harden has done everything except hire a skywriter to let everybody know that if he can get out of Houston, he wants to go to Brooklyn, too.
This all goes on as the Knicks start rebuilding with a new team president, a new head coach, and a team that ought to be called the University of Kentucky at Madison Square Garden.
The Nets are the basketball team to watch in New York, now and for a long time. The Mets want to be that kind of team, even coming off a season when they couldn’t manage to be one of the 16 teams to make the postseason. They have Marcus Stroman back. They are getting Noah Syndergaard back. In so many ways, they have a reasonable right to expect Pete Alonso back after a weird, disappointing short season. You can’t call them a now team after they couldn’t get to .500. But it’s also not as if they have a ton of holes to fill.
We can imagine how different a batting order that already has Alonso and Michael Conforto and Jeff McNeil and Dom Smith, who looks poised to be a baseball star, will look if they can add some stick, in this baseball off-season where there seems to be a lot of stick out there.
So it’s been fun being Steve Cohen so far, trailed as he has been by the sound of applause. The guy who owns the baseball that once rolled through Bill Buckner’s legs seems to be having more fun than anybody in National League New York. He spent a couple of billion and saved us from A-Rod the Owner and became the most popular kid in class. But this is the old line about only getting one chance to make a first impression, even as Sandy Alderson is getting a second chance to do that.
Not the owner. This is his. Now we see what he does with it.