Major League Baseball Executives Are Wetting Their Pants Over New York Mets Owner Steve Cohen Spending Money

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Before we begin here, I would like it on the record that if it were up to me, the New York Mets would not exist. They are a joke of a franchise that will always be the little brother in their own city and playoff choke artists.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get our first order of business.

New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is very, very, very rich. Forbes estimates that Cohen is worth somewhere around $17.5 billion dollars. That’s a lot of zeroes and enough to make him the richest owner in Major League Baseball by a fairly wide margin.

This offseason, after the Mets’ embarrassing postseason collapse in 2022, Cohen is putting that money to good use. The Mets have committed a reported $806 million to free agents since the start of December, including a recent move for superstar shortstop Carlos Correa after it appeared he was bound for San Francisco.

New York will have the league’s highest payroll in 2022. The Mets will also pay an exorbitant amount in luxury taxes to the rest of the league.

Both of these are good things. Billionaire owners should be spending money on players and trying to win. And it’s not like they’re breaking any rules to do so. But the big bad rich man is making some MLB owners and executives cry, and that is now a major story.

MLB Owners Are Mad That Mets Owner Steve Cohen Is Trying To Win

Losing money as an MLB owner is nearly impossible these days. Gigantic TV contracts and revenue sharing mean teams stand to bring in a hefty payday every year, regardless of results.

And if they don’t, there is no shortage of prospective billionaire buyers out on the market.

Instead, however, some owners would rather point to Cohen and cry “poor” rather than spend money on their teams.

Evan Drellich of The Athletic spoke with MLB executives who, despite enacting a rule to try to benefit from Cohen’s spending, are still wetting themselves over his spending.

“I think it’s going to have consequences for him down the road,” said an official with another major league team who was not authorized to speak publicly. “There’s no collusion. But … there was a reason nobody for years ever went past $300 million. You still have partners, and there’s a system.”

I’m no expert, but saying “there’s no collusion, but…” sure sounds like there was collusion!

“Our sport feels broken now,” a different rival executive said Wednesday. “We’ve got somebody with three times the median payroll and has no care whatsoever for the long-term of any of these contracts, in terms of the risk associated with any of them. How exactly does this work? I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it.”

While not every team can spend the way that Cohen can, they don’t need to in order to succeed. The Kansas City Royals won the World Series in 2015, and the Cleveland Guardians and Tampa Bay Rays have each made appearances more recently than the New York Yankees.

It may be time for some of these owners to either open up their checkbooks or look into a sale, because Steve Cohen isn’t going away.