Reality bites
Cohen's inaugural Series proclamation at odds with direction of not-so-Amazin's
THERE’S a surplus of quotes across the years that the quoted would dearly love to walk back. John Lennon once observed that he thought the Beatles were more popular than Jesus and hundreds of thousands of copies of “Rubber Soul” and “A Hard Days Night” were torched in bonfires across the Bible Belt.
George Bush the elder once asked us to read his lips as he pledged “no new taxes,” and as the kids might say today, that quickly became a freezing-cold take. On the day he bought the Yankees in 1973, George Steinbrenner famously said, with (remarkably) a straight face: “We plan absentee ownership.”
You probably know where this one is going because it is already quite apparent that, if he could, Steve Cohen wouldn’t just walk this one back, from Nov. 10, 2020, his first official day as owner of the Mets, he’d shove it in a burlap bag, sprint to the Throgs Neck Bridge, send it over the side with a few planks of cement and let it drown in the drink:
“If we don’t win a World Series in 3-5 years, that would be disappointing.”
What Cohen has discovered in Year 3 as Mets owner is that buying a baseball team is not unlike buying a new car: You will never be happier than the moment you drive your new wheels out of the showroom and off the lot. On Day 1 with your new ride, you think about all the adventures you’ll enjoy behind the wheel, and it never occurs to you that the engine will seize or the tires will blow or some dope with his nose buried in his iPhone is going to ram into your door.
On Day 1 of being a New York sports owner, title-or-bust seems about right.
You never think about it simply being reduced to “bust” in three short years.
You certainly don’t think about alienating your fans in 33 months or so, but here we are. David Robertson is gone, and that signaled a death knell for 2023. Max Scherzer is gone, and that immediately made you wonder about 2024. And if Justin Verlander goes next, and you are a Mets fan, how do you not immediately fast-forward in your mind to 2025 (a season that, for the record, Pete Alonso is not yet signed for).
It’s important to state a couple of things here. First, there is no way to determine a trade-deadline bonanza in real time. In the same way the Bobby Bonilla Day silliness should always be mitigated by the fact that agreeing to that deal eventually allowed the Mets to draft David Wright, any of the players acquired could well become headliners of future Mets glories. There’s no way to know.
And Cohen has the proof of a billionaire’s fortune to point to and say: “This is what happens when you choose clear-headed, cold-blooded reason over the hyperventilation of emotion,” which is clearly what is defining his decisions in the days and hours before the trade deadline. It all makes sense seen through that prism.
But he’d better be right. And he’d better hope that Billy Eppler — the man who delivered Darrin Ruf and Tyler Naquin and Daniel Vogelbach and invented the idea that a championship bullpen is stuffed with pitchers armed with minor league options rather than 98 mph fastballs — has helped guide that vision.
Because the fact is, Mets fans weren’t wowed by how Cohen made his fortune when he became the team’s owner. They were wowed by the fortune itself. They were immediately smitten by the idea of an owner — unlike the past owner — for whom money was no object. And Cohen jumped into that veneer with gusto, piling up the highest payroll in baseball history along the way.
It hasn’t worked out. And now it is fair to ask two questions of Cohen:
1. Is he gun-shy?
2. Has this entire season been an elaborate bait-and-switch?
These seem relevant if only because the white flag appears raised despite the Mets only being five games in the loss column out of a wild-card spot. Now, the results of 105 games tell us that the Mets sure don’t look like a playoff team.
But all you need to do is go back to 2016. On Aug. 19, the Mets were 60-62 and six games out of the loss column for the wild card and their pitching staff was in tatters. They had four teams to jump. In the space of 40 games, they did just that, with room to spare. Cohen sold Mets fans something, and the fact is that over the weekend, with a last-place team in town and the sell-off already afoot, he still saw 122,938 people come to his ballpark. They bought those tickets believing in one version of the team while getting another.
And remember: 32 of the Mets’ final 51 games will be home. That’s a lot of empty baseball (and a lot of already-sold tickets) ahead.
Maybe Cohen’s cold eyes and colder blood wins out in the end. It had better. In the 50th anniversary of when Tug McGraw and friends coined the forever rallying cry of “Ya Gotta Believe!” it was Eppler who came up with the newest team slogan.
And “Ya Gotta Repurpose!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.