Mets boss won’t be The Boss Joel Sherman

THERE was an art to covering George Steinbrenner, and part of that was to assume nothing. Employees seemed more on a minute-to-minute than year-toyear contract. The Boss often had the equivalent of a general manager in both New York and Tampa, and you never knew who had his favor at any time. And often it didn’t matter because Steinbrenner was as likely to be influenced by his chauffeur or a hanger-on from his inner circle as the actual head(s) of baseball operations. There was no a + b = c when you covered George. In his world, a + b could equal a ham sandwich. The Yankees could need a starting pitcher — and acquire a fourth designated hitter. Really, the art was staying flexible to any possibility. In many ways, the history with Steinbrenner is why I contacted Steve Cohen a few weeks back as his Mets started to crater. Hal Steinbrenner has shown he lacks his father’s impetuousness. The Wilpons were hard to guess along with, but mainly due to having tin ears and a bizarre sense of what would work. Cohen was a more unknown entity. I reached out not knowing how he would react to having the largest payroll ever and a team in full plummet, particularly because the picture drawn of him from his finance life was not of a patient boss. So it made me wonder if this boss had some of the old Boss in him.

But Cohen said there would be no firings, that he was sticking by his leadership group and players and that he still believed in the 2023 club. He offered logic and patience over the knee-jerk.

What has followed in the twoplus weeks since those comments, however, is even worse baseball by his team and an even greater deficit to the playoffs. And Tuesday afternoon — several hours before his club played well in a 7-2 victory over the Brewers — he tweeted, “I will be doing a press conference tomorrow before the game. You will get it from me straight.”

Had he changed his mind in twoplus weeks? Had more bad baseball shaken the logic and patience? Steinbrenner has taught me not to assume, especially with as large a personality as Cohen.

However, my suspicion is he will express his frustration on Wednesday, but not change his tune much. There was something Cohen said to me earlier this month that resonates. I mentioned how much fans want bold action amid the surprising level of poor play and he responded, “They care so much, they want immediate fixes. And sometimes there aren’t immediate fixes. Sometimes you can do a lot of damage by being impulsive. Not just in the short term, but in the long term. If I were incredibly reactionary and started doing irrational things, why would anybody want to come to this organization and be subjected to that?”

You might recall that after the 2020 and 2021 season, Cohen had difficulty recruiting the best and brightest to run baseball operations. There were many reasons the top candidates were often rejecting even an interview. I heard multiple forms that the book “Black Edge” was being widely circulated and that the unflattering portrait of Cohen running his hedge fund was reverberating. Cohen also was tweeting with regularity and executives worried about leaving more comfortable environs and suddenly being Twitter fodder for their boss.

This also reminded me of George Steinbrenner. The enduring image is of Steinbrenner creating a winner with his hair-trigger decision making. But the Yankees went from 1979-95 without a World Series, from 1982-94 without the playoffs and spent most of those years as a laughing stock in which the best players/executives with choices avoided The Bronx. Why deal with persistent haranguing and threats of firings — plus actual firings? So in key positions, Steinbrenner often wound up with incompetents and lackeys who would take the abuse in exchange for a paycheck.

It wasn’t until suspension removed Steinbrenner’s overbearing daily presence that Gene Michael fixed baseball operations, Buck Showalter fixed the clubhouse and all benefited from the wonderful farm system created by Bill Livesey and Brian Sabean. “All” included Steinbrenner when he returned — and the Yankees actually have had stability and persistent winning ever since.

With the Mets, Cohen wound up with Billy Eppler as about a 10th choice. Is he the right person? Maybe, maybe not. But the in-season options are not great for that or manager, and dismissing one or the other right now is not solving the Mets’ 2023 issues. And it is not going to bring comfort to good replacement candidates. Cohen is smart enough to see that. He is pointing his wallet and his mindset toward making the Mets a long-term stable contender.

He could scream, fire and win a certain in-the-moment love from the fan base in 2023. But I don’t think in Cohen’s current ownership that a + b can equal a ham sandwich. He is more logical, more long planning. So my gut is that he will remain publicly frustrated, but not impetuous.