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Steve Cohen’s Tweeting Doesn’t Matter; How Much He Spends On The Mets Does

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This article is more than 2 years old.

Wednesday morning featured another familiar pattern in the brief, stormy tenure of Steve Cohen’s Mets ownership.

The team lost — in this case, the opportunity to sign Steven Matz to a long-term deal. Instead, it was the Cardinals acquiring the free agent and former Met for four years, $44 million.

Cohen vented his displeasure over this turn of events on Twitter.

This is an unconventional approach, to say the least. The owner of the Mets had an issue with an agent — in this case, elaborating on it to the New York Post’s Joel Sherman — and went public with it.

What’s followed is a now-familiar criticism of Cohen’s tweeting, something he addressed in his most recent press conference, during the introduction of new general manager Billy Eppler earlier this month.

“I’ll continue to tweet, probably not as much as I did previously,” Cohen said. “Especially during the [GM] search, I wanted to respect the candidacies of the people we were talking to and didn’t want to make it a public search. … I didn’t want to turn this into a game. Now that [the search is over] I’ll probably get back on and see how it goes. We’ll see. I think people like it, so why not keep doing it?” 

The argument seems to be that Cohen is going to negatively affect perception of the Mets with his tweets, and/or hamper their ability to rebuild trust with fans.

This ignores, however, the immediate predecessor in the owner’s box.

Fred Wilpon, in the spring of 2013, gave what turned out to be his final press conference as New York Mets owner. He said some demonstrably false things, and then, over the final seven seasons in charge, he failed repeatedly to invest in the Mets at a level commensurate with the team’s market size.

His silence, presumably, was not the problem. His team’s failures were.

The issue Steve Cohen inherited, then, was two-fold. He’s the owner of a team that seldom communicated from the top. And he took over a team with massive holes, a farm system not yet built to address them, and an obvious solution — in a salary cap-free league, the richest owner, who has vowed to spend whatever it takes, can turn things around in short order.

This is, of course, what happened in Los Angeles, where new ownership blew well past the luxury tax, adding salary in every conceivable way — free agency, lopsided trades that took on salary, international signings like Yasiel Puig — and have proceeded to make the playoffs nine consecutive seasons, including three NL pennants and a 2020 World Series title.

Would Dodger fans have an issue if ownership tweeted about this? It’s doubtful.

The Mets face a public perception problem that clearly predates Steve Cohen. But it isn’t an insurmountable one. It does require, however, a clear break not only from the communication of the past, but with the actions.

The expectations of Mets fans when the richest owner in American professional sports took over a team in a salary cap-free league were enormous, yes, but the deficit of trust and more significantly, of spending on basic elements of a team structure had been lacking for well over a decade in many cases, if not longer.

The team’s reputation, too, had suffered enormously, one reason the search for a new general manager took so long.

There’s an easy solution to this — easy, that is, if you are America’s richest team owner — outspend everyone. By a lot.

An example from across the ocean offers some cautionary tales, but ultimately, a reason for optimism as well: Manchester City of the English Premier League.

Man City was the bumbling second team in a city mad for their sport, in the shadow of a franchise that won regularly and marketed itself around its superiority. Sound familiar yet?

Even after a new owner took over for a financially compromised one, the winning took a while — figuring out that spending money required the right front office decisions, avoiding mistakes of the past from a mindset that came from prior ownership’s hires.

So, how’s it gone since then?

Right. Overwhelming the competition with money works pretty well in the EPL, too.

It is understandable that Mets fans worry this won’t happen with Cohen in New York, both because for well over a decade, they were told by his immediate predecessor, through pliable media members, that spending was just around the corner, only to see it never happen. But Cohen’s also been in charge for a year now, and it hasn’t really happened yet on a scale that can overwhelm the best-run MLB teams yet, either.

That said: any echoes of the team’s past that are evoked from his tweeting can be alleviated by different outcomes. Whether he tweets or not isn’t going to keep agents from accepting the most money for their clients from Cohen. And whether he tweets are not isn’t going to make Mets fans happy when they finish 77-85, or ruin the joy of the day the Mets end their 35-year run without a World Series title, either.

It’s still difficult to believe Steve Cohen, a man who is baseball’s richest owner because he’s had both an insatiable appetite for winning and now, a most public forum to do so, shelled out more than $2 billion to... lose out at the margins on starting pitchers and then complain about it on Twitter.

Steve Cohen can tweet and spend money at the same time. The best reason for optimism the Mets fans have is that there’s a lifetime of work suggesting he’s going to do so, and soon.

The reasons to doubt him, though, aren’t that he’s tweeting. It’s that he hasn’t spent the money yet.

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