A new era is about to begin in Queens
From America’s most powerful hedge fund mogul to the King of Queens: Who is Steve Cohen?
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . The New York Mets’ first owner was Joan Payson, who was instrumental in bringing National League baseball back to New York and owned the team from 1962 until her death in 1975. Besides baseball, Payson had many other passions, including art collecting, charity work, and horse breeding. Several of her family’s horses went on to win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes.
. . . The longest-tenured owners in Major League Baseball are the Steinbrenners, who have owned the New York Yankees since 1973. The shortest-tenured MLB owner is John Sherman, who purchased the Kansas City Royals in 2019 for $1 billion.
Leading Off
Getting to know prospective New York Mets owner Steve Cohen
By Kyle Newman
Most fans around MLB don’t know the owners of other baseball teams. What does it matter, their names never come up anyway? When they do know, it’s usually not for a good reason. That’s the case for the Wilpon family.
Fans around MLB mocked the Mets and their fans for supporting a team owned by such incompetent owners. Mets fans called for the Wilpons to sell the team for years, and it was warranted. No ownership group has spent more time meddling in the team’s day-to-day baseball operations than the Wilpons.
Their incompetence has cost the Mets years of winning. Whether it was the “worst team money could buy” in 1992, the collapses of 2007 and 2008, or the refusal to build on the 2015 NL champion team, the Wilpons always found ways to screw up a good thing. When the fans’ angry voices grew louder, and a growing debt came due this past year, the Wilpons were left no choice but to sell the team.
Enter hedge fund billionaire and lifelong Mets fan Steve Cohen. After months of up-and-down, contentious negotiations, Cohen is an owner vote away from becoming the new King of Queens. Most fans outside of New York probably know little about the man likely to become MLB’s newest owner, outside of his approximately $14 billion net worth.
Yes, Steve Cohen is set to become MLB’s richest owner, by a wide margin, but that’s not everything baseball fans need to know. Cohen has his pros and cons as an owner. Like any man with enormous wealth, he has skeletons in his closet.
Cohen was once listed as one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. He is the only hedge fund manager to ever be included on this list. Cohen was once one of the most powerful hedge fund moguls in the world. With good reason, he had a reputation for hiring the right people and making the right investments based on a revolutionary analytics-based system, a philosophy he plans to bring to the baseball world.
Cohen doesn’t need to control everything. He prefers to gather information from those he trusts and make a decision based on that information and the advice of his employees. That skill would be welcome in Queens. Someone who’s willing to trust his top lieutenants and advanced analytics instead of using people like puppets and ignoring analytics would be a huge change for the Mets.
Everything about Cohen’s leadership style and analytics dependence points to someone well suited to run a MLB team. Mets fans should look for him to try to run the team in a similar fashion to how the Dodgers are being run, with a heavy focus on analytics, strong focus on development, and a willingness to spend when the right opportunity is there.
That doesn’t mean Cohen is perfect. On the contrary, he has a massive dark side. In 2013, Cohen was charged with insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The charges were later dropped, but not until Cohen agreed to a $1.8 billion settlement, the largest insider trading settlement in history. Sadly, it doesn’t stop there. Cohen has also been involved in a number of gender discrimination cases. None of these were against him personally, but any lawsuits against the company he runs are personal blemishes. There’s certainly reason to worry about his character. The last MLB owner to have character concerns this great was Jim Crane, and the Astros organization is now disgraced after a cheating scandal.
None of this is to say that Cohen is going to come in and disgrace the New York Mets. Cohen is a lifelong fan with the money to make the team great, but his dark side can’t be ignored. This could go one of two ways for the Mets. Either Cohen is exactly who they hope he is, or he is exactly who his detractors fear he is. Be careful what you wish for, Mets fans, you just might get it.
Extra Innings
"I'm glad that someone who's been a lifelong Mets fan ended up getting the team." - Mets outfielder Brandon Nimmo
Kyle Newman is a lifelong Mets fan turned sportswriter. You can catch him writing baseball for Elite Sports NY, where he is the lead New York Mets writer, or appearing as a guest on podcasts. Follow him on Twitter @NewmanNYsports.