In a perfect world, Steve Cohen’s master plan as the Mets owner would have had two pretty distinct phases.
Phase 1, Years 1-5: Win, obviously, by spending lots money on free agents.
Phase 2, Years 5-plus: Win, obviously, by spending a healthy amount of money on free agents to fill in around home-grown talent from a flourishing farm system.
Folks, we’re pretty much to the point that we can call Phase 1 a failure. It’s certainly not from a lack of trying from the Mets’ owner, which is what makes this frustration so much different from the frustration under the previous ownership group. But this is Year 3 with Cohen, and it’s been the worst one yet.
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The Mets are 36-44 after a 5-2 loss at home on Wednesday to the Brewers. They’re mired in fourth place in the NL East, 17 games behind the first-place Braves, and 6 1/2 behind the third-place Phillies. They’re 8 1/2 behind the third and final NL wild-card spot, with five teams between them and the Dodgers, who have the final berth at the moment.
It’s been a huge disappointment, to the point that Cohen felt it necessary to sit down with the media for 22 minutes on Wednesday afternoon, a couple of hours before the game, for a state-of-the-franchise news conference. Cohen is not the first MLB owner who was successful in other areas of business to find out just how challenging it can be to see that success translate into October baseball success.
At one point, he was reminded by a reporter that, early on, Cohen said he would be disappointed if the team didn’t win a World Series title within the first three to five years. He sounds much less confident now.
“It's always possible. You never know, right?” he said. “If you can get into the playoffs, anything can happen. Winning a World Series is really hard; 29 teams lose, one team wins. But the goal is to put yourself into position for good things to happen. That's the goal. I've been bridging that as we rejigger our farm system. I came in, no pitching, a lot of the tools weren’t there. These things take time. To develop talent takes time. I wish it was faster.”
In his first year owning the Mets, Cohen’s club won 77 games. The .475 winning percentage was better than the club’s showing during the shortened 2020 pandemic season, when the Mets won just 43.3 percent of their games and missed the postseason, despite an expanded playoff field. Last year, of course, the Mets won 101 games, but they stumbled at times down the stretch and allowed the red-hot Braves to catch them atop the division. Then they were knocked out in their only playoff series.
With a lot of the same players — plus the offseason free-agent additions of starting pitchers Justin Verlander and Kodai Senga — hopes were high heading into 2023. A repeat of the previous season’s triple-digit win total was not just hoped for, but expected.
And, well, we already talked about their record so far this season.
“It’s terrible,” Cohen said. “That’s not what I expected.”
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So now, the conversation ahead of the Aug. 1 trade deadline isn’t who the Mets might be interested in acquiring, but who they’d be willing to trade. As Cohen mentioned a couple of times, there are still a few weeks before those decisions have to be made, and a quick 9-1 stretch could change the feeling about the season. But they’ve only won more than three in a row once since mid-April, and they’re currently 7-17 in June. A 9-1 streak doesn’t seem likely.
They’ll almost certainly sell, and there absolutely is a path to selling now that doesn’t have a huge impact on the team’s chances of competing in 2024. That starts with moving the free-agents-to-be, guys such as Carlos Carrasco, David Robertson, Mark Canha, Brooks Raley, Tommy Pham and Adam Ottavino.
And what about Max Scherzer, who turns 39 in late July, and Justin Verlander, who is 40? They were signed as win-now guys, not long-term solutions. So if the team isn’t winning now, trading either or both would be a good way to help the Mets in the long term.
Because if their next couple of starts are good, you can bet there are plenty of teams with World Series aspirations that would love to add them at the deadline. And Cohen has said — and shown, as in the deal that sent Eduardo Escobar to the Angels — that he’s willing to kick in money along with a deal to increase the trade return coming back to New York.
“I already consider the money spent,” Cohen said, speaking generally and not specifically about Scherzer and Verlander. “So in that unfortunate circumstance, so if I can find ways to improve our farm system and that’s the path we take, I'm willing to do it.”
And here’s maybe another thing to consider: No part of Cohen’s plan includes a stretch of rebuilding, where the team punts a few years to get high draft picks, like some other franchises. So as unpalatable as it might seem, maybe this year is that opportunity. The Mets didn’t expect to have a bad record, but we’re at the end of June and only seven teams have worse records than the Mets. That puts them in line for a Top 10 pick in the 2024 MLB Draft.
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Trade away those free-agents-to-be and maybe either Scherzer or Verlander, secure that higher pick and swear never to let it happen again. If building the farm system is the goal — Phase 2 of Cohen’s plan — this is a rare opportunity to get an advantageous spot in the draft to help that process. The type of prospects who could be acquired in trading former Cy Young winners represent another opportunity.
Might as well take advantage, right? Get something positive out of a disappointing season. Because the plan isn’t just to spend crazy money on free agents every year for the next decade. That was just the early attempt at building a winning team.
“Free agency is really expensive. If you want to field a good team from free agency, that's what it costs, if you want to fill all the positions with hopefully quality players. Sometimes you get it right, and sometimes things go wrong,” Cohen said. “It’s a tough place to build a team from, which is why I keep saying, the goal here is to build up a farm system, because ultimately that gives you a lot more options. When we look at our pitching today, we had to go out in free agency and get pitchers over the last couple years. We haven’t really developed that many pitchers, which is actually pretty shocking. We’re certainly capable of doing it. We may not have had the right infrastructure in place. We just opened up our pitching lab. Well, guess what? Other teams had pitching labs six, seven, eight years ago. So we’re behind. The goal is to provide all the resources, all the infrastructure that makes us competitive with other teams.”
With most franchises, it’s been a choice: Spend money on impact free agents or spend money to create the necessary infrastructure to draft and develop players. Cohen, though, is willing to spend on both.
“When you invest in your business,” Cohen said, “it should pay dividends.”
So far, it hasn’t. Will that continue? Stay tuned.