As we get closer and closer to Steve Cohen taking over the New York Mets, we also get closer to finally getting concrete answers on how the Mets might operate under his stewardship. Those of us who follow the team closely grew to be able to predict quite accurately how things would go when the Wilpons were running things. Hell, I only wish they would have surprised me a little more often. I always expected the worst from them and they almost always delivered. Cohen, on the other hand, is an unknown at this point. There is plenty of speculation on what he might do, based on what is known about how he runs his hedge fund business, but nobody will really know exactly how things will go until we get to see the Cohen owned Mets in action.
In a way, that's pretty convenient for projecting your own feelings of how the Mets should be run onto all of that unknown. Hey, it would be really smart if the Mets did this thing. Cohen is a really smart guy, so I'm sure they will do that thing once he's running the show. I've indulged in that kind of thinking plenty on this blog. I try to base it as much as possible in factual information, such as what we can read about his business philosophy now, but I can't pretend to have any special insight into the guy. One thing's for sure, though. For someone who cares about Mets baseball as much as I do, and has spent decades watching the Wilpons muck things up so completely, it's a healthy dose of sweet fresh air to indulge fact-based hope on things being done the right way at last.
When articles come out like Mike Puma's in the New York Post last week, "Steve Cohen to blow up Wilpons' 'archaic' Mets technology", it feeds that need in me to project intelligence and competence into future Mets moves. A big takeaway from the piece is that sources are telling Puma that Cohen expects to lose about $400 million on the team over the first two years of his ownership. That alone is a good reason for Cohen to have been selected out of all the bids to buy the team.
After Cohen was selected to enter into sole negotiations to buy the club, Alex Rodriguez said that his group had set $300 million aside that wasn't part of the purchase price to cover losses and ensure that the Mets could run higher payrolls at the beginning. But given the tough financial situation the Mets were in before the pandemic hurt, the resulting losses from this strange season without fans, and the continued uncertainty for at least next season, that might have been a tough thing for his group to do while taking on so much debt just to buy the club. I worried that if A-Rod's group came out on top there would have been a huge temptation for them to put what money they did have into obvious fan-facing places such as payroll, while potentially ignoring so many of the other places that the Wilpons left the Mets deficient.
We just witnessed a couple of great playoff series wrap up last night. The two teams that came up on top, the Rays and the Dodgers, built success on having a tremendous team organization that enables them to draft and develop well and make smarter choices when they sign major league players, too. Of course, they differ greatly in how much money they have at their disposal to spend on the major league roster, which led them to quite different routes to eventual success. Still, the overall intelligence and sheer competence driving both clubs is something that Mets fans could only look at with envy under Wilpon ownership. The lesson learned from so many years with Fred and Jeff calling the shots was that there was virtually zero hope that the Mets could replicate those efforts.
When you look at the Braves, the team that took the Dodgers to a 7th game but wound up falling short, you see another team that. at least currently, is way better set up to win in upcoming seasons than the Mets. Really, at least right now, so are the Marlins. The Phillies have had some problems taking the talent they have developed and supplementing it properly with the right additional pieces, but even now have to be at least on an equal footing with the Mets going forward. Whichever of the two clubs makes smarter moves over upcoming seasons is likely to come out ahead. And even the Nationals, who are clearly in need of a rebuild in the short term, have some really exciting young players to build a new contender around. The Nats also have been better run than the Mets in recent years.
With the Marlins no longer being run as a scam to defraud the city of Miami and the game of baseball, the Mets were in real danger of being the worst team in the NL East over the next couple of seasons, maybe longer, particularly if Washington avoids a full rebuild. The franchise was essentially screaming out for someone to ride in and save them from that fate. Only a new owner with both plenty of cash, a real desire to win and a penchant for seeking to run his business with forward thinking intelligence was going to interrupt that descending trajectory the Mets were on.
That's precisely why Steve Cohen is being looked at with so much hope by people like myself who really care about what happens here. It wasn't bad luck that has held the Mets down for so long, it was short-sighted, backward-looking management by folks who had absolutely no clue at all how to change things for the better.
A friend was teasing me recently about Steve Cohen, asking me if I thought Cohen was a "good guy", and if I believed the multi-billionaire actually cared about me personally. My answers were, respectively, I don't care and of course not. I'm not looking for a personal hero, I'm looking for someone to do a really good job of running the baseball team that I've spent almost all of my life rooting for, since I lack the personal fortune required to buy the club and do it myself. The rest is inconsequential to me. That's why the trolling stuff written about Cohen negatively doesn't phase me at all. If I feel the need for a personal hero and/or someone who cares about me, I'll look elsewhere. As for Cohen, I truly suspect that how much time we spend talking about him in upcoming years will decrease in direct proportion to how well the club seems to be run. I, personally, look forward to writing about team success rather than trying to divine if the organization is being run correctly.
The idea that he is prepared to lose $400 million, which is hardly chump change even to a very, very rich guy, in his first couple of years as owner, signals to me that he sees the handwriting on the wall for where the Mets are headed without a big-time overhaul in everything that they do. Yeah, there's some talent on the major league roster, and a few potential high-impact prospects in the system currently, but not the quantity required to compete with more talent-rich and better run clubs both within their division and in the rest of the National League. There's a lot of work to do, and doing it right will pay dividends far beyond the undeniably huge cash outlays required to right the ship. It's a smart investment from a guy who has a pretty good track record in investing smartly.
So, please forgive me if I talk about some of this stuff quite often. It freaking matters, and the Wilpons' continuous failure to see this clearly is the one overarching reason why even modest sustain success always eluded them - and, by extension, us.
No comments:
Post a Comment