Steve Cohen not sweating winless Mets start: ‘It’s only four games’
Mets owner Steve Cohen was preaching patience for his ballclub during a Wednesday morning appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The Mets are still in search of their first win of 2024 after dropping their first series of the season to the Brewers and falling 5-0 to the Tigers on Monday before getting a respite thanks to rainouts on Tuesday and Wednesday.
But Cohen isn’t letting the poor start get him down about the Mets and compared the start to a few bad days that can occur when you run a hedge fund.
“It’s only four games into the season,” Cohen said. “It’d be the equivalent of getting off to a bad start, let’s say in a hedge-fund year you have a couple of down days early in January. You still got a lot of time left to do what you normally do. Yeah, nobody wants to start 0-4, but it’s early, right? During the season you’re gonna have losing streaks. We just happen to have one at the beginning.”
The Amazins’ offense has struggled at the start of the season with the team being held to one or fewer runs in three of their first four games of the year, and Brandon Nimmo, Francisco Lindor and Jeff McNeil combined to go just 3-for-44.
Cohen has notably been a passionate owner since purchasing the Mets in 2020, he told CNBC that he leaves the player decisions to his baseball staff.
“I’m not making the decisions. My baseball people are making the decisions,” he said. “My job is when they need me to support their decisions they come to me and say, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I’ve never said no to anything. I mean, we have discussions, and we talk about it, but those ideas are not coming from me, which is totally different than running my hedge fund.”
Cohen, who is also the CEO and chair of Point72 Asset Management, added that he was much more hands-on with his hedge fund, but that with 200 portfolio managers, they also have the freedom to do what they need without being micromanaged.
“I’m used to operating in a very decentralized way and I give people a lot of rope,” Cohen said.
The ugly start for the Mets isn’t going to win over many fans, who were already reeling from a 2023 that saw them finish 75-87 after boasting the highest payroll in the major leagues.
The Mets made more subtle player moves this offseason, with the focus on building the team through developing young talent while sprinkling in big-name free agents when it makes sense, which could come next offseason.
Yankees slugger Juan Soto could be one of the names on the market.
Cohen said during the “Squawk Box” interview that he didn’t “care about the cost side.”
“I said in my original press conference if I can make millions of people happy, how cool is that? And so I actually view it as a civic responsibility,” he said. “Listen, nobody wants to lose money forever and spend money and not have success. And to me, I deem success as not only winning the World Series, getting in the playoffs, and winning the World Series, it’s also developing a deep farm system that creates talent over the years over and over again.”
The Mets hope to turn the corner starting on Thursday when they play the Tigers in a doubleheader at Citi Field.
