Mets’ owner buys plenty of goodwill

When it comes to image makeovers, it would be hard to top the one currently underway by Connecticut resident Steven Cohen.

A few years ago, he was called the most wanted man on Wall Street. Today he’s beloved by legions of sports fans who consider themselves to be longsuffering, and all he had to do was lay out $2.4 billion to buy the Mets and promise big-spending days to come.

The Mets are eternal victims of little brother syndrome. No matter what they do, they can never match up to their legendary counterparts in the Bronx. The Yankees not only have more World Series titles than anyone, but they also compete for a championship every year. A winning season is their baseline. Mets fans expect — reasonably — they should have the same standards, but it rarely works out that way.

The result is a franchise that occasionally contends and once a decade or so puts together a great team, but is nevertheless viewed as forever second best. An ownership team that spent recent years bemoaning its status, rather than trying to do something about it, only made matters worse.

Cohen is an antidote to all that. “Cohen … is seen as a knight in shining armor, galloping in to save the franchise from oblivion with an arsenal of cash (and) a reputation as a savvy business manager,” is how the New York Times put it in an article about the new owner bantering with fans on Twitter. Amazing how much goodwill a few billion dollars can get you.

Contrast that with the portrait that emerged in “Black Edge,” a 2017 book by the New Yorker writer Sheelah Kolhatkar that chronicled the years’ long effort by the government to take down Cohen’s former hedge fund, SAC Capital. Cohen himself was never charged, but the company he ran was indicted and pleaded guilty to insider trading charges and paid a huge fine.

Cohen was portrayed as secretive, conniving, playing at the very edge of what the law allowed, all while keeping a virtually nonexistent public profile. Just as important was Kolhatkar’s portrayal of the hedge fund industry that Cohen ruled. “The hedge fund moguls didn’t lay railroads, build factories or invent lifesaving medicines or technologies,” she wrote. “They made their billions through speculation, by placing bets in the market that turned out to be right more often than wrong.” Maybe society could expect a little more in return for those 10-figure incomes?

After SAC Capital’s guilty plea, Cohen was barred from operating a hedge fund for a few years, but he’s back at it now, with offices in Stamford. His net worth is by far the highest among Major League Baseball owners. If he manages to win a World Series in New York, the goodwill he’s seen so far would be piddling in comparison.

It’s not just fans enjoying the new situation. According to the New York Daily News, ballpark employees have started receiving COVID-prompted relief assistance — $500 a month until Opening Day — for out-of-work Mets staff, something the previous owners had fallen short on. Asking multibillionaires to come through for their lowestpaid employees is a low bar, but one that many fail to clear.

No one believes it now, but when I was a kid all my friends were Mets fans. They won the World Series when I was 9 years old, and were looked at as the cool up-and-coming team, while the Yankees were fusty and boring.

It didn’t last. 1986 proved the Mets’ last championship, while the Yankees have padded their total considerably. Life as a Mets fan, for better or worse, has stuck anyway.

But is there a moral quandary in rooting for a team run by someone who so recently had a company that ran afoul of the law? Maybe. But good luck finding a professional sports team that doesn’t have an owner whose exploits are questionable. And in the pantheon of offenses, insider trading, which doesn’t change a real-world result but often only amounts to one billionaire getting richer at the expense of another, is low on the list.

Let’s go Mets.