Steve Cohen Is Paying Premium Prices for Discount Baseball:
I took shots at David Stearns in the preseason, and honestly I should have taken more.
Because this Mets roster is exactly what it looked like back then: a smart guy trying way too hard to prove he’s the smartest guy in the room, only to end up building a team that looks like it was assembled during a carbon monoxide leak.
This team makes no sense.
It is unbalanced, awkward, lifeless, and built like Stearns was personally offended by the existence of outfielders. Every night the Mets take the field looking like a team that forgot one crucial detail during the offseason: baseball teams usually need actual players at all the positions.
Stearns built a roster like a guy who thinks he’s solving baseball instead of just participating in it. The whole thing screams, “Look how clever I am,” when really it should be screaming, “Why do we have nine infielders and three guys who should never be anywhere near left field?”
This is the kind of roster construction that gets praised by people who use the word “optionality” with a straight face.
You know what else is optional, apparently?
Having a functional outfield.
Having a real identity.
Having any normal human feel for what a baseball team is supposed to look like.
The Mets built this thing like one of those appetizers where the chef stacks tuna on a Pringle and calls it deconstructed cuisine. Sure, maybe there’s a theory behind it. Still looks stupid. Still not enough food. Still leaves everybody annoyed.
The All Infield Experiment Was Always a Joke
Let’s stop dancing around it.
David Stearns spent an entire offseason acting like he cracked the code to baseball when really he just kept signing the same player over and over again.
The Mets didn’t build a roster.
They built an infield convention.
At one point I thought there had to be a promotion. Buy two utility guys, get a third free. Because there is no other explanation for why this team looks like it was assembled by someone who thinks left field is optional.
You cannot run a real team like this.
You cannot stack six, seven, eight guys who all do the same thing and call it versatility. That’s not versatility. That’s laziness disguised as intelligence.
Stearns didn’t build depth.
He built duplicates.
And now those same duplicates are being shoved into spots they have no business playing, running routes that look like they’re guessing mid flight, and everyone’s supposed to act surprised when it turns into a circus.
That’s not bad execution.
That’s exactly what you built.
Carlos Mendoza Manages Like He’s Waiting for His Uber
Then you get to Carlos Mendoza.
Good lord.
Mendoza manages like a substitute teacher who knows the class is out of control but does not want to make anything worse. Every time the Mets look flat, sloppy, or half asleep, his whole vibe is basically a man trying to survive until dismissal.
I’m not asking him to go full lunatic in the dugout every night. He doesn’t need to start launching Gatorade coolers into the third row. But could he at least manage like someone whose team is actively embarrassing him?
Because too often Mendoza looks like he’s watching the game the same way we are. Confused. Slightly annoyed. Not particularly empowered to stop any of it.
He manages with all the force of a guy saying “hey fellas” after watching somebody back into his car in a parking lot.
No bite.
No edge.
No pulse.
And when your roster already looks like it was built in a lab by a guy who’s never seen a fly ball land, that lack of urgency becomes even louder.
The Juan Soto Excuse Is Already Dead
And before anyone runs to the safety blanket, let’s kill this now.
Yes, Juan Soto being out matters.
He’s one of the best hitters on the planet. Obviously that impacts a lineup.
But if your entire operation falls apart because one player is missing, that’s not bad luck.
That’s bad construction.
The Mets don’t look broken because Soto isn’t there. They look broken because they were built like this from the start.
Soto didn’t create the outfield problem.
He didn’t create the lack of identity.
He didn’t build a roster that feels like it was assembled by throwing darts at a depth chart.
Blaming him is convenient.
It’s also nonsense.
This thing was leaking before Soto ever went down.
If one injury collapses your entire team, you didn’t build a contender.
You built a house of cards and acted surprised when someone breathed on it.
Steve Cohen Is Paying Premium Prices for Discount Baseball
And then there’s Steve Cohen, who might be the only person on earth watching this team and thinking, “Yeah, this looks like a great use of money.”
Because that’s the funniest part of the whole thing.
This isn’t some scrappy low budget disaster. This isn’t a team pinching pennies and hoping for miracles. This is a massively expensive dumpster fire. This is baseball’s version of buying a Ferrari and finding out it has no doors, three tires, and the radio only plays excuses.
Cohen is paying an absolute fortune for this mess, which somehow makes his constant false optimism even funnier.
While the Mets are out there playing baseball like a group project where nobody read the assignment, Cohen is on Twitter talking like a guy who just spent $400 on a steak dinner and got served a microwaved hot dog.
“We’re close.”
Close to what?
A normal outfield?
A real identity?
A manager with a pulse?
A roster that doesn’t look like David Stearns accidentally sorted by infielders only?
It’s honestly incredible.
Steve Cohen is paying luxury tax prices to watch a team that looks like it was built at a yard sale.
He’s tweeting through it like a guy desperately trying to convince himself the purchase was worth it. Every optimistic tweet has the energy of someone standing in a flooded basement saying, “A few encouraging signs here.”
No, Steve. There are not encouraging signs.
You paid top dollar for a team that still looks confused, flat, and badly assembled.
That’s what makes this whole thing even more Mets.
They’re not just bad.
They’re expensive bad.
Anybody can build a mediocre roster.
It takes real talent to spend like a drunken billionaire and still end up with a team that looks like half the lineup was selected by autocomplete.
And the false optimism only makes it worse.
Nobody is asking Cohen to hop online and call his own team a joke, but maybe stop tweeting like this is all part of some genius long term plan when the product on the field looks like an overpaid practical joke.
At some point, you’d like the owner to sound less like a motivational speaker and more like someone who realizes he’s paying absurd money for a baseball team that keeps tripping over its own shoelaces.
Steve Cohen Is Tweeting Like This Is a Summer Camp
And that’s what makes Cohen so perfect for this mess.
The team looks like a disaster, and he logs on sounding like he just discovered baseball terminology five minutes ago and is trying to blend in.
“Love the at bats today.”
“Good energy from the boys.”
“We’re trending in the right direction.”
What direction is that exactly?
Because from the outside, it looks like the direction is sideways.
At some point, you’d like the owner of the team to sound like he understands what he’s watching. Not like he’s live tweeting a sport he just got introduced to during batting practice.
Nobody is asking him to torch the team publicly, but pretending everything is fine while the roster construction is this flawed just makes it feel like nobody at the top actually gets it.
Which, honestly, tracks.
Because this entire operation feels like a bunch of smart people convincing themselves they’re smarter than the game, while the results keep screaming the exact opposite.
Final Thoughts
I said in the preseason that David Stearns deserved criticism for the way he handled this offseason.
That take aged like a Hall of Fame Cabernet.
Because this roster is not just flawed.
It’s dumb.
It’s a dumb roster built by smart people who desperately wanted credit for being smarter than everyone else.
And Carlos Mendoza is the guy left trying to steer the shopping cart with the broken wheel.
The Mets are unbalanced, oddly built, weirdly lifeless, and somehow still manage to act surprised by their own problems.
Which is honestly the most Mets thing imaginable.
They didn’t lose Juan Soto and fall apart.
They were already falling apart.
Soto just made it easier to see.
And at the center of all of it:
David Stearns built this mess.
Carlos Mendoza stands there and watches it.
Steve Cohen pays for it, tweets through it, and somehow still acts like this is all part of the plan.
And the Mets are stuck looking like a team that tried to be cute when it should have just tried to be good.
