Revisiting Steve Cohen
I have to hand it to Steve Cohen for what he said last week about Francisco Lindor, after Lindor’s grand slam against the Phillies helped send the Mets to the NLCS:
Obviously it’s not unusual for an owner to praise one of his players after postseason heroics, but doing so by specifically citing his high salary as justified is pretty good. It’s a rare concession by ownership that these big long-term contracts that players sign are, in fact, worth it.
It’s particularly important in Lindor’s case, because, for a few different reasons, his contract has been pretty polarizing since he arrived in New York before the 2021 season. First, the contract was signed before Lindor was even a free agent, and many have accused Steve Cohen of giving Lindor the extension only because he wanted to make a big splash in his first months as the Mets owner. Then, Lindor had a bad year in his first Mets season, playing in just 125 games and having the worst offensive numbers of his career. This, combined with a subpar Covid season in 2020, made some people wonder if Lindor’s numbers from 2017-2019 were just a product of the juiced ball, and perhaps he was not the superstar people assumed when he signed the contract.
But over the last three seasons, Lindor has been terrific — it’s just that his greatness is such that he seems destined to be underrated, since he is very good at basically everything, but not excellent at any one part of the game. For example, last season he finished 9th in the NL MVP race, even though his WAR was higher than half the players ahead of him. This year, he put up even better numbers, and likely would have won the award had he not been eclipsed by Shohei Ohtani’s 50/50 season.
So it’s nice for Cohen to acknowledge that Lindor’s grand slam was really the culmination of a great career he has had with the Mets — a career that clearly justifies the financial commitment the team made to him.
But, of course, I remain skeptical of Cohen’s motives.
It was ironic that, on the same day as Lindor’s grand slam, the New York Post reported that New York Governor Kathy Hochul would be working to secure Cohen’s bid for a casino license as part of the 2025 state budget. The Hochul administration quickly denied the report, after pushback from state legislators, but it was a reminder that Cohen’s proposed plans for a casino next to Citi Field, though long dormant, are not dead. And if New Yorkers happen to have a more favorable opinion of him because of a charmed Mets playoff run, then that can’t hurt…
I’m not exactly saying that Cohen is praising Lindor as part of some Machiavellian plan to win New Yorkers to his favor while he bribes public officials for a casino — he’s a longtime Mets fan, so he’s probably just excited the team is in the NLCS. But it’s a reminder that there are many ways that owners can make money from their teams, and they are not just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Talking about a team’s “profitability” and whether an owner can “afford” to sign a superstar player is pretty myopic in light of something like this casino deal, which illustrates that teams are really just pieces of large, private, billion-dollar empires — and sometimes disposable pieces at that (I’m looking at you, Oakland). Right now, the interests of Mets fans seem pretty aligned with the interests of Cohen and his empire, and that’s working out pretty well for the team. But the honeymoon period doesn’t last forever, and it’s not good for baseball, sports fans, or the world in general to have so many public questions hinge on the whims of billionaires.