Mike's Mets - Still the Right Man for the Job

 

By Mike Steffanos

Amidst a season of poor play and uncertainty, I still feel good about the guy who owns the team.

I'm beyond the point now where I believe the New York Mets are more likely than not to turn things around in 2023. I thought the team deserved the benefit of the doubt for quite a while based on last season's performance. But their inability to sustain a level of quality play for more than a handful of games here and there has made it abundantly clear that this club could legitimately be the crushing disappointment they appear to be 66 games into the season. Things have to change considerably over the last 96 games for 2023 to finish as anything better than an unmitigated disaster. Could they do it? Sure. But it doesn't feel like the likely outcome any longer. The Mets certainly don't look like the type of team we hoped they would be back in March.

With all of the struggles this season, many fans are calling for the head of GM Billy Eppler and manager Buck Showalter — the two most visible faces of the Mets' organization. Both certainly bear responsibility for the poor performance of this expensive team. However, I don't believe either of them has done such a poor job that they should be handed a pink slip and a bus ticket out of town. It would appear that owner Steve Cohen feels likewise. Based on his own words in a long interview with the New York Post's Joel Sherman published over the weekend, he has no intentions of pulling a George Steinbrenner-type of tantrum. As Cohen stated to Sherman:

"When things get really bad, I'm not going to blow up," Cohen said. "I don't think that's the proper response. I don't think it solves anything, other than it gives people a one-day story. But it doesn't really solve anything... And I think in some ways it can be demotivating.

..."You have to take a look at your process. Work hard. Try to fix what you can fix. And not be reactionary. I think that's the worst thing you can do is to be overly reactionary. General fan reaction, it's usually, 'I can't believe Steve's not going nuts, fire somebody.' My answer to that is, 'OK, let’s say I went nuts. Let's say I fired somebody. Then what?' What does that accomplish? Who are you gonna replace them with? This is the middle of the season. And then if you actually ask people [who are the replacements], they have no answers, other than they're just angry, and I get that. I'm frustrated too. The players are frustrated. The front office is frustrated. We are frustrated. No one expected this. This is really surprising. It doesn't mean that things won’t get better. If we can find ways to fix our weaknesses, we'll try."

I found Cohen's words in the interview quite reassuring. I'm 64 years old, and I've been a Mets fan for most of my life. Decade after decade, the Mets organization was markedly inferior to all of the best organizations in baseball. The biggest reason seemed to be a decision-making process that was deeply flawed. When things seemed to be going well for a period of two or three years, there was always the nagging feeling that prosperity wouldn't last. And, sure enough, that would inevitably prove to be the case.

I've written a lot of words of criticism about Fred and Jeff Wilpon in this space. I took writers to task who lectured fans that criticism of the Wilpons was somehow "unfair." I thought the Wilpons deserved the harsh words for a simple reason: they ran the club for decades and never seemed to learn a damn thing. They were the one constant that connected failed regime after failed regime. The reason things always went bad had nothing to do with bad luck or Ponzi schemes. The owners were unwilling or at least unable to do the hard work required behind the scenes to build a winning organization. While the Mets would occasionally get some stuff right, they would get so much wrong. Inevitably, this failure of vision would come back and bite the Mets in the ass. 

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