For Steve and Hal, only metric that matters is winning it all
There aren’t two baseball owners anywhere more visible or more famous than the ones we have in New York. Hal Steinbrenner is famous because he owns the Yankees, because he is a Steinbrenner, because he’s the son of the most visible and famous baseball owner who ever lived.
Steve Cohen is famous for having more money than any other owner in professional sports.
But even owning teams on different sides of town, they are actually a lot alike, and want pretty much the same thing:
Steinbrenner wants the Yankees to be the Yankees again.
Cohen wants the Mets to be the Yankees, period.
What that really means is that Cohen doesn’t want his team to be the Mets teams he has known as a fan for most of his life, the Mets who have been the Other Team in town for their entire existence, except in 1986, of course, when the Mets weren’t just the greatest baseball show in town, they were one of the greatest baseball shows of all time.
So not only do our two owners have basically the same ambitions going into the season that starts this week — Mets against the Brewers at Citi Field, Yankees against their old friends, the Astros, in a house of horrors for them called Minute Maid Park — they are each looking at stakes bigger than their teams’ payrolls. Much bigger. Steinbrenner the Son wants to show that his Yankees can finally win another World Series on his watch, what would be their first since 2009, which happens to be the only Series in which they have appeared since the Red Sox came from 0-3 down in the ’04 American League Championship Series. That was when the Sox not only made history, but changed it forever in both New York and Boston. You know how often the Yankees have gone 14 seasons without appearing in the World Series since they first starting winning the World Series, right?
Once.
That was the period between 1981, the end of Reggie Jackson’s Yankees, and 1996, when Joe Torre’s Yankees began. The Yankees would then play five World Series in the next six years and win four of them. Not only did Derek Jeter never play a World Series game after ’09. He never played another postseason game after he broke his ankle in Game 1 of the 2012 ALCS.
And maybe you’ve heard that last season the Yankees not only didn’t make it to the Series, they didn’t make the postseason at all, finishing with a record of 82-80, the closest they have come since 1992 to having a losing season.
“They [the Yankee players] believe they have something to prove after that disaster last year,” Steinbrenner said not long ago.
Listen: The longer the Yankees go without making it all the way to the end of October, or into November, the more this is on two people: George Steinbrenner’s son, and George Steinbrenner’s former intern, Brian Cashman, who Yankee fans sometimes think has run the team’s baseball operation since dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Those are the stakes for Hal, always high because of the team he owns, getting higher every year that the Yankees, who practically invented the World Series in this country fall short of what Hal Steinbrenner says constantly is their “ultimate goal,” as though they’re still Torre’s Yankees. Except they’re not. You know who the modern-day Yankees are in the American League? The Astros, who have made it to seven straight league championship series, and been to the Series four times. Along the way they have beaten the Yankees three separate times in the ALCS.
The stakes are as high for Cohen. He’s the one who said how disappointing it would be if the Mets didn’t win the World Series in the first “three to five years” he owned the team. That was November of 2020. Now the Mets are entering Year 4 of the Cohen era. He has a new manager, a new president of baseball ops in David Stearns, the Mets are coming off a 75-87 season on which Cohen spent more money on baseball players than any owner has ever spent. Cohen now admits he’d like to have that comment back about three to five years. Well, yeah, George H.W. Bush probably felt the same way about “Read my lips: No new taxes.”
Cohen also said recently that he inherited the farm system he inherited from the Wilpons, not much he could do about that. He made it sound in that moment as if he’d somehow put down over two billion dollars for a distressed company. But even with all that, and without much help from that farm system, Buck Showalter somehow managed Cohen’s ballclub to 101 wins two years ago, which was two more regular season wins than the Yankees had that year.
Cohen isn’t sure what the Mets are capable of this season, especially not playing in the same division as the Braves and the Phillies. But about this one thing everyone is certain: Off the field, he’s much more the face of the Mets than Stearns, or rookie manager Carlos Mendoza. This is on him, with the meter running, and not just on
payroll.
Whether he would ever admit it or not, the stakes for Steve Cohen — in so many ways the new George Steinbrenner, just without the bombast and bluster and back pages — also involve ego. His. Another similarity between him and Steinbrenner the Elder. Because the last thing in the world Cohen wants, now more than ever after his team nearly finished in last place in 2023, is to start looking like another rich guy — the richest guy, in his case — who couldn’t win in sports the way he won in business.
The other day Cohen talked about the “general expectation being pretty low” for this edition of the Mets. But then came in behind that saying this:
“I think we’re going to surprise to the upside.”
The Mets might very well do that. The starting pitching might get better from last year’s oldies show with Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander. J.D. Martinez, who hit 33 home runs in just 113 games for the Dodgers in ’23 will certainly provide both protection, and back-up, for Pete Alonso. And the trumpet guy, Edwin Diaz, is back.
The Yankees? They somehow managed to lose 35 games to the Orioles in the standings over the past two seasons. But if Juan Soto helps hit the Yankees back to the Series, his acquisition will be as important as George Steinbrenner signing Reggie.
Stakes all around in Baseball New York this season. None higher than for the two owners. In a time when there are so many metrics in baseball, there’s only one that matters to the New York baseball fans when it comes to their owners:
How many World Series have you won?
Can’t just buy them. Another way they’re the same.
They’ve both tried.