Steve Cohen dropped $375 million on a baseball team this year, and what he got for it was a last-place club that made six errors in a single game against the Cubs, a 28th-ranked pitching staff, and a fired manager.
https://twitter.com/Joelsherman1/status/2070499338908762175
Carlos Mendoza is gone. Andy Green — VP of Player Development, previously managed the Padres into their own abyss — is the interim. David Stearns went in front of cameras and said he’s going to “continue to give this team time to prove that we can get back in this in a very legitimate sense.” The Mets are 34-47. They gave up 29 runs in their first three games against the Cubs alone. They have the second-highest payroll in baseball. Time to prove what, exactly?
This isn’t a slump. This is organizational identity fraud.
Bo Bichette is hitting .219 on a $136 million deal. Devin Williams has a 4.44 ERA on a $51 million deal. The only guy earning his money is Luke Weaver at 2.12 ERA, which is the baseball equivalent of one functional appliance in a condemned house. The trade deadline is August 3rd. Stearns is talking about parallel paths and legitimate sense. Meanwhile the Mets are 13 games under .500 and trending toward a 12-game losing streak they already ran in April — their worst since 2002.
I dated a Mets fan for two years. I have watched this organization do this exact thing — confuse spending with building — for as long as I can remember. She used to say “this is the year” every March, and I used to nod, and then October would come and we’d both feel stupid. Different reasons, same outcome. She’s probably still doing it. The Mets definitely are.
The reason Stearns won’t commit to selling at the deadline isn’t stubbornness or incompetence. It’s the logical end state of Cohen’s entire philosophy. When you believe payroll is the solution to every problem, you never develop the muscle to cut your losses. You can’t sell Juan Soto trade chips because that would be admitting the project failed. You can’t blow it up because that means admitting MLB’s cap structure let you overpay your way into a catastrophe instead of punishing you for it. The firing of Mendoza wasn’t a decision — it was a pressure release valve. The real decision, the one that would require actually acknowledging this season is over, still hasn’t been made.
Fair counterargument: Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor both missed significant time hurt. The roster on paper is legitimately talented, and firing the manager when your two best players were injured for stretches is a little convenient as an explanation for 34-47. Maybe “more time” isn’t totally delusional.
But the Mets got walk-off grand-slammed by Devin Williams — the same Devin Williams they paid $51 million and who is now costing them games instead of saving them. That’s not an injury story. That’s an organizational one. You don’t get to spend $375 million and then cite injuries as the reason everything went wrong. You spent $375 million so injuries wouldn’t sink you.
The runway doesn’t end in September. It ended sometime around that 12-game losing streak in April, when the Mets were still pretending this was fixable and the rest of baseball had already moved on.
