Mets' Steve Cohen suffering sticker shock
New York Mets owner Steve Cohen addresses the media before a game against the Milwaukee Brewers at Citi Field on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 in the Queens borough of New York City. Credit: Jim McIsaac
The Mets’ Steve Cohen and the Padres’ Peter Seidler were hailed by many as heroes this past winter for their spending sprees, which created fan-pleasing payrolls cited as evidence of how an MLB franchise should operate. If team values continue to skyrocket, along with the sport’s growing revenue streams, then shouldn’t owners be flush with enough cash to buy annual upgrades?
What made Cohen and Seidler so popular among baseball fans everywhere undoubtedly earned them some side-eye from their fellow owners, a group that prefers to have costs stay in, well, a more modest range, so to speak. The fact that the Mets and Padres were legitimately trying to buy a World Series title this year probably had more than a few owners rooting against them — with the commissioner’s office leaning toward that side as well.
Now, with the season officially half over, the “money can’t buy championships” crowd is having a moment. Though it’s not entirely true across the board — seven of MLB’s top 10 payrolls are in possession of a playoff spot or within two games of that October prize — the spectacular failures of the Mets and Padres are proving to be a cautionary tale.
The sugar high of the cash-happy offseason is wearing off here at the start of July. What’s left feels like a mouthful of cavities with a trip to the dentist’s office coming up.
Cohen has admitted from the jump that boosting the Mets’ payroll to $377 million, the highest in baseball history, was the necessary byproduct of bridging the gap between a lagging farm system and the win-now mentality in Flushing. That’s not to say he didn’t seem to enjoy the dopamine rush of buying players like Picassos, and with an estimated $17 billion fortune, he was fine writing those checks.
But with the Mets on the verge of being sellers at the Aug. 1 trade deadline, sitting at 10 games below .500 (36-46) and 10 games out of the third wild-card spot before beating the Giants on Saturday, who could blame Cohen for feeling as if he got ripped off?
Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, his pair of $43 million co-aces, have underperformed. His $102 million closer, Edwin Diaz, suffered a devastating injury at the WBC. Francisco Lindor is a slick-fielding shortstop who flashes power but is not a $341 million player by any measure.
Cohen seems to be getting a better grip of this baseball reality, judging by what he said at Wednesday’s news conference. It’s understandable that a hedge-fund billionaire would crash the league by throwing money around, thinking that a championship could be bought in relatively short order. Everything has a price, right? But with his third season in jeopardy of becoming a very costly embarrassment, Cohen sounds ready to reconsider some of his previous strategy.
“Let’s assume this turns out to be a poor season,” he said. “Yeah, in retrospect, you’d like to spend less. But you don’t have that luxury when you’re trying to put together a team, and that’s the decision we made. Free agency is really expensive. If you want to field a good team from free agency, that’s what it costs . . . Sometimes you can get it right and sometimes, you know, things go wrong. It’s a tough place to build a team.”
Cohen repeated his desire to lower the payroll in the future — music to Rob Manfred’s ears — and referred to his current investment level as “unsustainable” (cue the other owners nodding furiously). That doesn’t fix this season’s costly train wreck, but it further emphasized the Mets’ need for an improved infrastructure.
“I don’t think it’s sustainable in the long term,” Cohen said. “Just losing the type of money that I’m losing. It’s a lot to ask, OK? We’ll figure that out as we go. I certainly have the wherewithal to do it. It’s just a question of how long.”
Seidler is wrestling with the same question in San Diego, where his stumbling Padres (38-45) are in a worse payroll dungeon than the Mets. They reloaded this past winter by spending $380 million on free agents, but that doesn’t include the 11-year, $350 million extension that Manny Machado signed at the end of February.
By the way, Machado was the Padres’ second contract in that ritzy neighborhood, after Fernando Tatis Jr.’s 14-year, $340 million deal, and helps put them on the hook for a whopping $1.35 billion in guaranteed payroll through 2029.
As for this season, the Padres have the third-highest payroll at $276 million — the Yankees are second at $294 million — which makes them only the runner-up when it comes to expensive flops in 2023. They were 11 1⁄2 games behind the first-place Diamondbacks and nine out of a wild card before winning on Saturday.
For all the talk of Juan Soto staying in San Diego, it now seems more likely that Soto — a free agent after the 2024 season — could be shopped again at the deadline, just as he was a year ago by the Nationals. For a point of reference, Soto reportedly turned down a 14-year, $440 million extension from the Nationals, and it’s not as if the Padres will have much more of an appetite for those salaries.
Also, the meager return from this mind-numbing investment should put president of baseball operations (and Huntington Station native) A.J. Preller on the hot seat. Preller first took over as general manager in 2016 but had his biggest breakthrough last season, when the Padres knocked off the Mets in the wild-card round and beat the rival Dodgers before losing to the Phillies in the NLCS. That spurred Seidler to approve a nearly $50 million bump from last year’s payroll, and he’s been rewarded with the franchise going backward.
Sandwiched between the miserable Mets and the putrid Padres, however, sits Hal Steinbrenner, who few realize technically spent the most in free agency during the offseason at $537.5 million — $360 million on Aaron Judge, but still. Not unlike those other two clubs, the Yankees currently are getting even less from the bulk of their offseason investments, with Judge on the IL since early June with a toe injury and Carlos Rodon ($162 million) yet to throw a regular-season pitch for them.
Despite all that money on the shelf, the Yankees were nine games over .500 (45-36) in MLB’s toughest division and holding on to the AL’s second wild-card spot entering Saturday. It shouldn’t be surprising. A Steinbrenner has been setting the MLB market for players almost from the moment free agency was invented, with general manager Brian Cashman running the show for a quarter-century.
Even if money can’t buy happiness, it definitely can help win baseball games. Just not in Flushing or San Diego this year. And how that impacts the industry remains to be seen.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
