While most would expect Mets fans to be mourning the team’s losing season, many are rejoicing.
Mets hope to finally bring a championship to Citi Field with a committed new owner in Steve Cohen. (Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia)
Steve Cohen is in the final stages of buying the team from the Wilpon family who have been blamed for many of the awful decisions that have caused the team to fail for so many years.
Cohen is an exciting new owner for many reasons, but the most obvious is that almost anyone would be better than the Wilpons, considering they were cheap and ignorant when it came to baseball.
If you need proof of the Wilpons’ horrible leadership of the team look no further, here are some examples:
1. They were involved in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes are immoral and a bad way to maintain any money long-term. Also, they’re a tad bit illegal.
2. They ran the team on a shoestring budget and were too cheap to pay more for fresh talent and often opted for older talent. This led to more injuries in the long run.
3.They bad-mouthed their own players to media publications in attempts to make themselves look better.
4. It’s alleged that they fired an executive for having a baby out of wedlock. While this doesn’t relate to baseball, it’s evidence of the miserable environment they imposed on anyone involved with the team.
So, as you can see, they are not the strongest candidates to be good, regular people, let alone lead a professional baseball team. This is why Rolling Stone ranked them the number 14 in worst owners in sports in 2015.
While a dog in a suit would be better than the Wilpons, Cohen stands out as a good choice for owner for a few reasons.
Cohen is incredibly rich—his net worth is 14.6 billion dollars. Cohen is already giving fans hope, announcing prospects that he intends to go after. One prospect is Trevor Bauer, who is Jacob deGrom’s—the Mets’ star pitcher and two-time Cy Young Award winner—greatest competition for this year’s Cy Young Award.
Money is important in all professional sports, but it’s especially important in baseball, with contracts reaching up to 300 million dollars and the average player salary coming in around 4.38 million dollars. So, the fact that Cohen has so much disposable income to put toward the team is a major reason his ownership could really shake things up for the Mets.
Further evidence of Cohen’s ability to inject the team with cash is he spent more on an art sculpture then the Mets have ever spent on a player’s contract, according to Sports Illustrated.
On top of this, Cohen is a lifelong Mets fan who actually cares about the sport. He’s not in this to make money; he’s in it to enjoy himself. This is opposed to the Wilpons, who rarely showed any excitement for the team beyond making money.
Cohen has already set his sights on bringing general manager Sandy Alderson back to the team. Mets fans are seeing his start as a new beginning, especially when the team finished in last place this season.
Their last-place finish is startling when you consider the talent in their lineup with Jacob deGrom being one of the best, if not the best, pitchers in the league. On top of this, they had three hitters finish in the top ten for batting average in the National League, with Michael Conforto taking sixth, Dominic Smith taking eighth and Jeff McNeil taking ninth.
Combined with this, half the league made the playoffs this year, making the Mets’ loss even more perplexing, but fans know the real truth. It’s the Wilpon curse running its full course. Now that the Mets are at rock bottom, they can bloom under a new owner.
Join Mets fans in their sigh of relief as they welcome the Mets to a new era, free of the Wilpon curse.