We are now entering Year Four of the Steve Cohen Era, and so perhaps it is time to look back on some of the hysteria that greeted him when he first bought the New York Mets back in 2020. Ever since Cohen’s first press conference after buying out the Wilpon family, we’ve been hearing about how Cohen is going to turn the team around: “I’m not in this to be mediocre. That’s just not my thing.” He said he wanted the team to be good every year, and that it would be a disappointment if they didn’t win a World Series in 3-5 years.
Even before that presser, actually, there was speculation about what a game-changer Cohen would be in the league. It was a controversial purchase, one that faced pushback from both other owners and then-mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio. Part of the objection was to Cohen’s tainted legal history: His old hedge fund closed after pleading guilty to insider trading (although Cohen himself avoided prosecution). But the bigger issue was just Cohen’s vast wealth.
You see, Steve Cohen is VERY RICH. Even by the standards of the owners of pro sports teams, he is very rich. How rich is he? Well, his net worth is estimated to be around $16 billion. I’ve written several times here about how “net worth” estimates are basically bullshit and you should never trust them, so we should take this $16 billion figure with a grain of salt. But at least for a relative measure, it is more than twice as high the “net worth” of the next richest MLB owner.1
This wealth disparity was supposedly going to change everything. If Cohen was as serious about winning as he claimed, then he could presumably use his deep pockets to outbid all other owners in free agency. After all, how could anyone else keep up with all his billions? For some other owners, this was a reason to oppose his purchase of the team, even though his bid was higher than all the competing offers. For Mets fans, though, this was a reason for hope. Finally, an owner who would compete in free agency!
And the money did flow: In his first offseason as owner, the Mets went out and traded for superstar shortstop Francisco Lindor and signed him to a $341 million extension. The next year they gave Max Scherzer a contract with the highest Average Annual Value in baseball history, and the year after that they signed Justin Verlander to a deal with the same record-high AAV. Along the way the team also made less flashy, but still important, signings, adding guys like Starling Marte, Taijuan Walker, and Mark Canha, as well as signing important pieces like Brandon Nimmo and Edwin Diaz to big money long-term deals. The effect of this was to bring the Mets’ payroll over $300 million. The spending was so much that, just a little more than a year after Cohen bought the team, when the new collective-bargaining agreement featured an additional luxury tax layer, it was immediately nicknamed the “Steve Cohen tax.”
But despite all this spending, the on-field results have been very mixed: The Mets finished below .500 last year and in 2021. They did win 101 games in 2022, but it was not enough to win the NL East and they were eliminated in the Wild Card round. So far this season, they are one of only two teams still without a win.2 It’s early, obviously, but it’s not like much is expected of them this season: Going into 2024, most models and experts are projecting them to finish with somewhere around 82 wins. That might be enough to sneak into the playoffs, now that MLB’s postseason is easier to get into the Arizona State, but not many people think they can compete for the division with the Atlanta Braves, or even the Philadelphia Phillies.
And more to the point, the 2024 iteration of the Mets looks… surprisingly cheap. Last year at the deadline, they traded both of their handsomely paid aces, Verlander and Scherzer, and have not made any real efforts to replace them: Their Opening Day starter this year was Jose Quintana, a 35-year-old journeyman on his seventh team who has a career ERA+ of 110. They did not extend fan-favorite Pete Alonso, who will be a free agent at the end of the season. For most of the offseason they made no major signings at all, instead giving one-year deals to castoffs from the crosstown Yankees, like Luis Severino and Harrison Bader. Eventually they did add J.D. Martinez, but only when his price came down at the end of Spring Training and they could sign him to a one-year deal as well. They waited so long to sign him that he missed most of Spring Training and, as such, has not yet joined the team.
The excuse is that the Mets are now “rebuilding”: They got good prospects back in last year’s deadline deals, and they have good young players who could potentially break out, like Francisco Alvarez and Mark Vientos. So why should they “mortgage the future” by going after big free agents? Isn’t a $300 million payroll enough?
But this is a far cry from the difference-maker Cohen was supposed to be. Instead of building a team that was going to compete every year and be in the World Series conversation within 3-5 years, Cohen’s Mets are doing what virtually every team baseball does, whether it’s a “big market” or a “small market” team: Game the luxury tax system, avoid long-term commitments, aim for mediocrity with a chance to get hot the playoffs, and continuously sell your fans on a “competitive window” that is perpetually a few years away.
How did this happen? How, in just four years, did Steve Cohen go from “I’m not in this to be mediocre” to “Look, what even IS mediocre, you know?”? And what does it say about owners as a class?
Let’s start with one simple fact: There is basically no correlation between an owner’s “net worth” and a team’s payroll spending. This ought to undermine the entire premise of the Steve Cohen Delusion, which is built on the idea that a richer owner will spend more on his team. But in reality, there is absolutely no basis for this belief.
It is hard to be too precise about this stuff because, as mentioned, estimates of an owner’s “net worth” are all basically bullshit, and they vary even depending on what source you’re citing. But most lists of baseball’s richest owners include, after Cohen:
Larry Dolan, owner of the Cleveland Guardians, who is supposedly worth ~$4 billion thanks to his family’s interest in the Cablevision media empire. And the Guardians were 26th in payroll last year. The team’s average payroll rank over the last ten years is 23rd. The last time they spent above the league median was 2009.
The Pohlad family, owners of the Minnesota Twins, is supposedly worth $3.8 billion thanks to the finance empire built by Carl, who Forbes ranked as the 102nd richest person in the US shortly before his death in 2009. Meanwhile, the Twins were 17th in payroll last year, and haven’t been in the top half since 2012.
Mark Lerner, owner of the Washington Nationals, who were 24th in payroll last year. Ted, his father, was named the richest person in the state of Maryland shortly before his death a few years ago. To be fair, the Nationals DID have a stretch of high payroll a few years ago, but since then have torn their World Series-winning roster down to the studs, including letting Anthony Rendon leave in free agency (after watching Bryce Harper walk the previous year) and trading Max Scherzer, Trea Turner, and Juan Soto because they didn’t want to keep paying them.
The Ilitch family, which owns the Detroit Tigers, has a multi-billion dollar fortune from the Little Caesar’s pizza chain, and the Tigers have been in the bottom half of the league’s payroll ever since 2017. Like the Nats, they DID have a period of big spending prior to that, but eventually cut payroll and began an indefinite “rebuilding” process. They have not finished above .500 since.
Certainly there are exceptions — the Red Sox and Dodgers have wealthy owners who generally spend money (although even Boston’s owners traded Mookie Betts to avoid paying him). And some low-spending teams, like the Rays and Marlins, are owned by people who have hoarded slightly less wealth than the other MLB owners. The point is not that there is necessarily an INVERSE relationship between net worth and spending, but that there is no relationship at all.3
And of course there is no such relationship. Why would there be any connection between an owner’s worth and player salaries? Imagining that a baseball team will pay players more because it has a rich owner is kind of like suggesting that Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers must make a lot of money because Jeff Bezos is so rich. Owners do not get rich by sharing their wealth with workers; that is precisely the opposite of how this all works!
The mistake here is thinking of the Mets as a charity, or something that exists only due to the largesse of a benevolent owner. But baseball is a BUSINESS, and a very lucrative one. Rich people don’t buy teams because they love signing big checks to players — they do it because sports are a good business. Baseball teams generate revenue (thanks entirely to the labor of the players and other workers, and having absolutely nothing to do with anything the owner does); it is from that revenue that players get paid. Indeed, in many leagues the amount of money that goes to players is explicitly tied to the revenue generated by the league.
Baseball does not have a salary cap, so it’s not quite so literal, but Steve Cohen is not paying players out of the goodness of his heart. More to the point, he is not paying them out of his own funds. Like any employer, he is paying them out of revenues he hopes to earn from the fruits of their labor. As such, he’s going to pay his employees what all owners pay their employees: as much as he has to and as little as he can get away with.
OK… except that Steve Cohen DID spend money. As mentioned, the Mets became the first team to spend more than $300 million on salaries last year and have the highest payroll in the sport. So even if there’s no rule that says rich owners HAVE to spend money, it sure seems like Cohen is staying true to his word, right?
Well, not really. In fact, this is classic owner stuff: It’s very typical for a flashy new owner to come into the league and start throwing his money around for a few years, but this doesn’t say much about his long-term plans. Let’s look at some other owners in baseball history:
In 1998, Tom Hicks bought the Texas Rangers for $250 million (this was considered a lot back then). His arrival, much like Cohen’s, was greeted with great fanfare, excitement, and fawning stories about how his vast wealth was going to change the game. In his first few years he handed out big contracts to Rafael Palmeiro, Chan Ho Park, and Juan Gonzalez. And, of course, in 2000 he offered the biggest contract in baseball history to Alex Rodriguez; at $252 million, the deal was worth more than Hicks had paid for the entire franchise, and would stand as the biggest deal in baseball for more than a decade.
But then, just a couple years later, baseball introduced a luxury tax into its collective bargaining agreement, and Hicks suddenly started talking about “breaking even” and how, actually, free agents weren’t so great. The Rangers traded A-Rod to the Yankees and cut their payroll by ~50% after the 2003 season. A few years later, in 2010 (less than a year after the billionaire counters over at Forbes officially knighted Hicks a billionaire) the Hicks Sports Group declared bankruptcy and Hicks sold the team.
Around the same time as Hicks was making waves in Texas, Jerry Colangelo, the initial owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, went on a free agent spending spree, adding Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, Luis Gonzalez, Mark Grace, Reggie Sanders, and Matt Williams, amongst others (some of these players were acquired via trade, but still given comparatively high salaries). They were in the top ten in payroll in four of their first five seasons and by 2002, the year after their World Series victory, their payroll was fourth in the league. But Colangelo had structured those deals to defer substantial amounts of the salaries, and when those bills started to come due, Colangelo was forced out for a more parsimonious owner, Ken Kendrick, and the Diamondbacks have never been in the top ten payrolls since, rarely cracking the top half.
Even the Wilpons — the Wilpons! — spent big in their early days as Mets’ owners. They added big money players like Mo Vaughn, Tom Glavine, and Roberto Alomar (with, um, mixed results), and for most of the 2002-2009 they had one of the highest payrolls in the sport. But from 2008 to 2013, they cut their payroll by over 45%. This usually gets blamed on their friend Bernie Madoff — since he stole a bunch of their money, they didn’t have any to pay their players. Of course, this is backwards. As I keep saying over and over again, baseball teams make money. So the truth is that the Wilpons started siphoning money AWAY from the Mets’ players. Perhaps this was to make up for the Madoff theft, but it’s important not to frame the Wilpons as victims in this narrative. Whatever the cause, though, the upshot was that Wilpons spent the last decade of Mets ownership as penny-saving owners in baseball’s biggest media market, until the fans had to be saved by the heroic Steve Cohen.
In other words, this is kind of a formula. Fans seem to have forgotten it, since the NEW formula — followed by Ricketts family when they bought the Cubs, Jim Crane when he bought the Astros, and Bruce Sherman when he bought the Marlins — is to tear everything down the studs when you buy a new team. But for MOST of baseball history, new owners liked to spend money.
Why? Well, there are many reasons to own a sports team, as I’ll get into in Part Two, but the biggest reason is probably the most obvious: It’s fun! It’s exciting to sign big stars and add new players to your roster! Who wouldn’t try to build a superteam if given the opportunity? New owners spend money for the same reason kids play with new toys on Christmas day.
But like kids with a new toy, they get bored easily. When they find out that spending a lot of money doesn’t automatically result in a World Series trophy, and when they start to see the bills pile up, they grow frustrated and start throwing tantrums. Sometimes this takes the form of reversing course and cutting salary; other owners continue to spend money, but interfere so much in day-to-day operations that the baseball people running the team can never build a successful foundation (see: The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim).
It’s too early to say what kind of owner Cohen will be, but there are some troubling signs. In his 3.5 year tenure, the team has seen more turnover than the Trump Administration. He fired Luis Rojas, the manager he inherited, after the 2021 season, and brought in Buck Showalter. Showalter won Manager of the Year in 2022, but was let go just a year later, and replaced by Carlos Mendoza — after the Mets’ first choice, Craig Counsell, turned them down for the Cubs.
The front office has been even more volatile, with four different top executives resigning after some controversy: Sandy Alderson and Jared Porter each left in separate sexual harassment scandals; Zack Scott stepped down after being arrested for a DWI (the charges were later downgraded); Billy Eppler is currently on baseball’s ineligible list for breaking the rules regarding use of the injured list. Eppler likely would have been out anyway because this offseason the team hired David Stearns — who Cohen WANTED to hire back in 2021.
In other words, this does not seem like a very well-run organization. And, perhaps more to the point, it does not seem like an organization that has unlocked the secret to baseball success by being bought by some rich asshole. Bringing in Stearns, who built his reputation turning the mid-market Milwaukee Brewers into contenders, seems like a pretty clear admission that Cohen has no special answers. Rather than trying to turn the Mets into a juggernaut, into “Dodgers East” as Cohen was fond of putting it initially, he’s now trying to turn them into the Brewers. Which… well, I guess you could do worse, but this is not exactly the game-changer fans were speculating about in 2020.
The lesson here is that owners as individuals do not matter. The search for some “good owner” is as fruitless as the search for the “worst owner”: Owners are bad as a class, for structural reasons that have nothing to do with them as people. To be clear, they are often awful people ALSO, but even the best person, as an owner, is a parasite, someone who exists to ruin the sport for his own gain. Fans should not pin their hopes on dreams of a BETTER owner, but liberation from the tyranny of owners altogether. They need us — we don’t need them.
This doesn’t count the Toronto Blue Jays, who are owned by Rogers Communications, the Canadian media conglomerate. Rogers has a market cap of ~$23 billion, so in that sense is “worth” more than Steve Cohen, but it doesn’t seem fair to compare Cohen, a human, to a publicly traded company.
OK, this is a little unfair, as the Mets have already had multiple rainouts so they’ve only actually played four games. But still: 0-4!
One example that shows the futility of this whole exercise is the Steinbrenner family, which owns the New York Yankees. They obviously have been among the highest spenders in the league for decades now, and sometimes you see them included among lists of MLB’s richest owners…. but that’s only because the Yankees themselves are so valuable. The phony billionaire counters over at Forbes attribute ~85% of the family’s wealth to their ownership of the franchise — they have no other major source of income, the way the Dolans, Lerners, and Cohen do. So should the Steinbrenners be thought of as wealthy owners or not? I told you this whole thing was kind of stupid…