Mets Owner Is Bidding For A Spot In Bad Owner Hall of Fame

The New York Mets are having a horrible season, and it’s a flashback to the bad old days that are putting owner Steve Cohen in the spotlight in the worst ways possible. Awful decisions and major malfunction have been a theme this year, although the Mets finally decided to clean house at the trading deadline, and not coincidentally their post-deadline record is now 20-12. 

Jon Greenberg of The Athletic did a take on this in his very entertaining piece about a hypothetical Bad Owner Hall of Fame, which came with a New York wing. The Mets chief representative in that elite rogues gallery was Fred Wilpon, and Greenberg offered  a colorful description of Wilpon’s incompetence:

“The Mets were mostly a laughingstock under his reign, especially in recent years,” Greenberg wrote, “before he and his son finally sold the team to Steve Cohen. The Wilpons didn’t have the money or the brains to run a New York team, even before the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scam hampered their payrolls.”  

Fast forward to the Cohen era, as he’s taken some big steps toward making this particular Hall of Fame this season. Cohen definitely has the money to run a New York team, but the brains may be another matter entirely. 

There are a couple of layers to what’s happened to the Mets with Cohen this season. He’s been under fire for his decision to hire former Milwaukee Brewers wunderkind David Stearns as his GM, as nearly every decision Stearns made this past offseason has backfired badly. 

The list starts with the disastrous decision to trade for former Brewers ace Freddy Peralta, who’s now slowly recapturing his form with the Tampa Bay Rays now that he’s out from under the Mets’ organizational umbrella. That list isn’t short, and all you have to do is look at the list of injured veterans who were Stearns’ idea to get an idea of just how bad the GM has been. 

But there’s another layer of dysfunction here that’s just as important, maybe more so. The fractured relationship between shortstop Francisco Lindor and outfielder Juan Soto that helped cause the Mets collapse has resurfaced in earnest, and it’s a story that’s not going to go away despite the Mets’ efforts to sweep it back under the rug. 

Cohen keeps denying that this problem even exists, but anyone who’s watched the Mets this year knows it hasn’t. Lindor keeps making boneheaded plays, and he and Soto keep surfacing as a story. It’s going to complicate an already difficult offseason as Cohen and Stearns try to figure out a way to correct all the mistakes the Mets made last year.