Mets’ Cohen Selling Most Expensive Roster Ever Ahead of Trade Deadline
Steve Cohen is learning what many new owners of professional sports teams have discovered before him. Running a team is not like hedging a bet on a stock or investing in some piece of valuable art—there are too many variables.
And when winning doesn’t immediately follow the money, it may be time to re-evaluate. That’s what Cohen and the New York Mets are doing as Tuesday’s 6 p.m. Major League Baseball trade deadline approaches.
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“I’ve been very patient,” Cohen said a month ago during a press conference.
No more.
Sunday, he officially traded Max Scherzer and his $43.3 million per year contract to the Texas Rangers for a minor league infielder. And now he’s listening to all offers for Justin Verlander, who signed a similar deal.
To divest himself of Scherzer, Cohen will pay $36 million of the $59 million the right-hander is still owed. He bought high on Scherzer, signing him to a two-year deal that included a third-year player option worth $130 million after the 2021 season. He sold low, getting Luisangel Acuña, the 21-year-old brother of Atlanta Braves superstar Ronald Acuña Jr., for the 39-year-old Scherzer.
Texas agreed to shoulder about $23 million of the money Scherzer is owed, giving Cohen those savings perhaps to spend elsewhere. Shohei Ohtani? That pending free agent is another story.
The Mets also traded veteran closer David Robertson to the Miami Marlins on Thursday for a couple of prospects, saving another $3.5 million on the one-year, $10 million free agent contract now assumed by Miami.
Verlander signed a two-year free agent deal last offseason for $86.7 million, and Cohen is still on the hook for the $14.4 million owed Verlander for the final two months of this season and $43.3 for next season, a total of $57.7 million.
Like Scherzer, Verlander would have to waive a full no-trade clause before he could be dealt. Unlike Scherzer, Verlander doesn’t have to exercise his own option. Some more creative financing may be ahead.
Cohen said the Mets’ farm system was bereft of pitching, thus he had to build a staff mostly through free agency.
“We hadn’t really developed that many pitchers, which in itself was pretty shocking,” Cohen said about a system that once developed the likes of Tom Seaver, Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom and Steven Matz.
Verlander is now pitching well for the Mets, having collected his 250th career win on the road to 300 Sunday over the Washington Nationals at Citi Field. Verlander was asked directly after the game whether he’d waive his no-trade clause.
“I think it largely depends on how the organization views next year,” Verlander said. “I think [the Scherzer trade] is a tough sign for trying to go back at it. I’m committed to trying to win a championship here, but if the organization decides that that’s not exactly the direction they think is the best fit to go for next year and go for it again, then yeah, I would be more open to it.”
Mets general manager Billy Eppler insisted in New York on Sunday that this is “not a fire sale, not a liquidation.”
“I do want to be clear that it’s not a rebuild,” he added. “This is just a repurposing of Steve’s investment in the club.” We’ll see.
Cohen has little to show for the record MLB player payroll of $345.6 million he spent on the Mets this year. “In retrospect you’d like to spend less if you knew it was going to be such a poor season,” Cohen said. “But you don’t have that luxury when you’re trying to put together a team.”
He’s not alone. If the season ended today, the teams that started the year with largest payrolls—the Mets, New York Yankees, San Diego Padres and Philadelphia Phillies—would not make the playoffs. The Rangers have crept ahead of the Phillies in payroll with their recent acquisitions.
The Mets, at 50-55, trail the first-place Atlanta Braves in the National League East by 18 games. They are also 6 1/2 games in arrears of the last of three NL Wild Card spots with four teams ahead of them.
Last year, his second season owning the team, the Mets led the Braves by seven games in the NL East as late as Aug. 10, but lost that lead for good when the Braves swept them in a three-game series at Atlanta the final weekend of the regular season.
Subsequently, the Mets lost a Wild Card Series at home in three games to the Padres.
Cohen kept spending, but nothing has gone right since then.
“Free agency is very expensive,” Cohen said. “If you want to field a good team from free agency that’s what it costs if you want to fill your positions with quality players. Sometimes you’re going to get it right and sometimes things will go wrong. It’s a tough way to build a team.”
Call it a fire sale or repurposing, but it’s clearly Cohen’s first admission as an owner he got it wrong. This week is giving us a clue how deep that lesson cuts.
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