‘Meaningful September baseball’ is a Met curse
The first year of the Steve Cohen regime began with Sandy Alderson throwing his old bosses under the bus and crowing about the new guy’s fat budget. Veteran reliever Brad Hand had cleared waivers; while the Wilpons still owned the Mets, any team could have signed Hand for a relative bargain of $10 million.
Alderson went out of the way at his re-introductory presser to say that “if the timing had been a little different,” Hand would have been a Met. None of this old Wilpon nonsense of signing three well-known players past their prime for $3 million each when you can just get the right man for the job at $10 million.
Things would be different this year.
Alderson’s sunny optimism about the Mets’ newly deep pockets was quickly put to the test on the free-agent market, where the team promptly wound up with James McCann instead of J.T. Realmuto and Kevin Pillar and Albert Almora instead of George Springer. Familiar Mets skinflintery, familiar Mets disaster. Cohen did wind up getting his man, however, picking up Hand at a heavy discount after the reliever bombed out with Toronto and Washington. Apart from a minor penchant for lighting himself on fire for an inning at a time, Hand has been a good addition for the Mets in September. Proof, perhaps, that Cohen and Alderson’s promise of spending their way to Met success has some merit.
After all, September has long held special meaning for the Mets. It was a long-running not-quite-ajoke that the old owners’ goal each season was to play “meaningful September baseball,” which is a world apart from “making the playoffs” or “winning a title,” but at least put a name to the malicious indolence that bedevils this franchise.
“Meaningful September baseball” is a formula for extracting maximum pain from the fan base: Construct a team that’s good enough to win 89 games if everything breaks perfectly, and then stoke enough faith that they might eke out 87. That maybe, just maybe, things would be different this time. It’s a formula that this year’s team followed to a T, even without quite the panache of the 2007 or 2008 September collapses. The Cardinals finally put the final nail in the 2021 coffin Wednesday night, with a sweep that naturally came on the heels of a fiery and entertaining series win over the Yankees that kept just a glimmer of hope alive.
Breaking that particular wheel will require more than just billions of dollars and a spicy, hands-on owner; the meddling Wilpons had plenty of vinegar anyway.
The Mets feel so cursed that it’s hard to tell where the demons end and the decades of institutional neglect begin. By bringing back Alderson, the boss from the Wilpons’ relative glory days, Cohen showed that he wasn’t particularly interested in finding out. Alderson’s first year of his second stint was something like a total disgrace. You could, generously, chalk up Alderson hiring two different criminals as general manager in the span of six weeks to atrocious luck. But Alderson himself — as he inadvertently outed a sexual harassment victim — admitted he didn’t talk to any women when vetting Jared Porter, even the assistant GM who worked with him in Boston for a decade. When The Athletic reported that Alderson sheltered sexist employees when he ran the front office the first time, his response wasn’t to deny it or apologize but to snap at the reporters and complain about a nonexistent “statute of limitations.”
The point here isn’t that the Mets are a singularly evil franchise getting their just desserts; the team that signed Trevor Bauer is gearing up for a World Series run without him. The point is that while the Wilpons were cheap, the problems they left behind run deep and can’t be fixed with money alone, no matter what idiotic blowhards were saying at the beginning of the season. (It was me, I was the blowhard.)
It will take much, much more effort than Cohen has been willing to make so far. On Thursday morning, a New York paper reported that the hedge fund billionaire will have trouble attracting talent to his currently threadbare front office because he tweets too much. It’s the type of story that is easily ignored as the sour grapes of rivals who might prefer to be graded on a more generous, “meaningful games”-style curve. But there is an obvious germ of truth there: The Mets’ baseball operations are mostly being run by Alderson and his son right now.
Instead of laughing it off, or promising that he would fill his front office with someone other than the man who was never supposed to be in charge and his adult son, Cohen spent over two hours Thursday morning tweeting about the story. Hilariously, he eventually tweeted that former Marlins president David Samson was the source for the story, the latest in a year of hamfisted back-channeling against Cohen from baseball’s old guard. (Memorably, White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf leaked a false story that Bill de Blasio might block Cohen from buying the team last October. The reporter and Samson both denied Cohen’s claim Thursday.)
Cohen will never win acceptance from that clique. The only way he can deliver the humiliation he lives to dole out is winning on the field. On that front, the Mets did have genuinely horrendous injury luck this year, and Cohen’s checkbook will have its first full offseason to impose its will, if he wants to do that. It isn’t too early for Mets fans to start getting their hopes up again. Things will be different next year.