From the moment Steve Cohen pulled the trigger on the deal that bought him the Mets, he’s had an unseen (and generally unwitting) ghost shadowing his every move. All the scouting reports from his business life suggested he might have more than a little Steinbrenner in him, something he didn’t exactly run from with some of his early uber-confident declarations.
Year 4 for Cohen begins in earnest Thursday afternoon at Citi Field against the Brewers. Year 4 for George Steinbrenner was 1976, which was the first pennant in 12 years for the Yankees, and laid all the groundwork for what would soon yield two championships. But it also was the end of the first of two separate times that Steinbrenner was compelled, by outside forces, to hire good baseball men.
As Ben Bradlee once said of his business: “I can’t do the reporting for my reporters so I have to trust them. And I hate trusting anybody.”
It was the same deal with Steinbrenner, often to his detriment. Twice, though, he was forced the hard medicine of having little choice but to trust them. That first time, when he was suspended from baseball for illegal campaign contributions, he’d brought Gabe Paul with him from Cleveland, and by the time Steinbrenner resumed his captaincy the Yankees had the bones of their title team in place.
Same deal in the early-’90s, when his involvement with Howie Spira forced him away from the game and allowed another savvy baseball man named Stick Michael to build a championship from within, something that yielded the fabled Core Four (plus Bernie Williams) and a modern dynasty.
Cohen has enjoyed little of Steinbrenner’s early success (two titles, five first-place finishes from 1976-81) and a fraction of his public humblings. Instead he’s fast-forwarded through the roller coaster and decided to entrust the entirety of his $2 billion toy to David Stearns, and he seems to have zero buyer’s remorse in handing him the keys.
And Stearns has happily zoomed off with the car.
This is their team, their project, their vision. They are in this together. It is important to remember that whatever glories Steinbrenner basked in as owner of the Yankees, they were made possible by the foundations laid by Gabe Paul and Stick Michael. It is relevant to remember that whatever highs the Mets have achieved were made possible by men named Johnny Murphy and Frank Cashen, who were each given undisputed control of baseball ops by deep-pocketed owners Joan Payson and Nelson Doubleday.
“I’m not a baseball man,” Doubleday declared the day he bought the team in 1980. “I need a baseball man to run my team.” And then he hired Cashen, and got out of the way.
And here’s the thing: It’s been fashionable to retroactively mock Cashen for the old-school sensibilities he brought to the Mets, but this is a matter of record: That ’86 championship team didn’t have one big-ticket free agent on the roster. It was entirely the result of smart drafting (Darryl Strawberry, Doc Gooden, Lenny Dykstra, Kevin Mitchell, Mookie Wilson, Wally Backman) and smart trades (Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter, Bob Ojeda, Ron Darling, Jesse Orosco, Ray Knight) that only were possible because of the tedious process of building a deep farm system.
It sounds like exactly the path Stearns has sold Cohen on. There are a lot of grumblings about that among some Mets fans. You should have heard what they were saying about Cashen in 1982 and 1983.
“For the first time we’re starting to look stacked [in the farm system] and I don’t think I ever would have used that term before,” Cohen said during a visit to Clover Park earlier this month. “And that is a good feeling.”
That may not be the kind of rousing locker-room speech that he gave on Day 1 — to review, that was “If I don’t win a World Series in the next three to five years — I’d like to make it sooner — I would consider that slightly disappointing” — but it’s probably the more responsibly authored company line.
Now all he needs is for Stearns to come through for him.
“We are a playoff-caliber team,” Stearns insisted to The Post’s Jon Heyman early in the spring, which is a nice olive branch to skeptical Mets fans (and, maybe, one for that sliver of his owner’s soul that might still be more comfortable just throwing his vast resources at the club). But a closer version of his own credo is probably this, which he said a few weeks later:
“We’re going to do our best to balance it and ensure that we can put a competitive team, a good team on the field right now. And also build that sustainable success long term that we’re seeking.”
We may look back in a few years and declare him a prophet, in the same baseball conversation as Paul, as Stick, as Frank Cashen. That’s the only way Mets fans can root, and it’s clearly where Cohen has put his money.