Could you imagine?
The new owners of the Mets on the rocks, relationship-wise, before even playing a regular season game?
You just have to imagine because it’s not real. Steve Cohen, not Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez, owns the Mets. And it’s not real, because the people who make the decision can imagine the risks of a J-Rod bid.
See, Cohen prevailed in the Mets sweepstakes because he was offering the most money, $ 2.4 billion. Yet that king’s ransom did not exist in a vacuum. It served as the centerpiece of the hedge fund titan’s sales pitch, one that couldn’t be rivaled by A-Rod and J.Lo, even beyond the total dollar count:
Stability.
While Cohen fully funded his offering, the J-Rod group, as you will recall, relied on a large number of people, including Vincent Viola and Mike Repole. So much uncertainty loomed as to who would be the consortium’s control person that, after Cohen and the Mets agreed on a price, The Post’s Lopez Joel Sherman told me she would take on the role of the controlling person if the Mets re-entered the market by virtue of Cohen getting insufficient acceptance from the other 29 owners; the owners approved Cohen on Oct. 30.
And if the prospect of A-Rod and J. Lo breaking up wasn’t quite in the hearts of the baseball folks – they could also consider A-Rod’s massive violations of illegal performance-enhancing drugs – then it had to go somewhere. lurk. there right? Neither mega-celebrity has mastered the long-term relationship yet. The Dodgers, with the McCourts, and the Padres, with John Moores, are two teams that turned aside due to separation of ownership.
Even though A-Rod and J. Lo aren’t married – they were engaged, and it’s not clear if they still are – it’s no surprise that The Post’s Dana Kennedy quoted a source: “Anyone on the business side works for the couple usually says, “Thank goodness they didn’t buy the Mets.” They were referring to the “ huge mess ” of figuring things out, but you can also imagine all the questions the Mets players would have been asked about the personal affairs of their brand-new owners.
The Cohen era did not turn out perfectly. The search for a baseball operations boss took longer than hoped and didn’t match the desired superstar executives, and the person who was eventually hired as general manager, Jared Porter, took just over a month before being fired for good reason after ESPN’s highly inappropriate behavior towards a female journalist in 2016 (when Porter worked for the Cubs). Cohen, after showing off his little-known sense of humor while captivating fans on Twitter, felt compelled to temporarily leave the social media platform after a tweet battle with Barstool founder Dave Portnoy over the GameStop wave resulted in alleged threats to his family.
None of these issues have seeped into the clubhouse from Mets of Zoom news conferences, but Porter had left by the time spring training began and the presence of team chairman Sandy Alderson, brought on board by Cohen even before he officially acquired the team, and assured that everything run smoothly enough.
A J-Rod property would have been great, if exhausting, for those of us in the press box. Their most recent statement that “We work through a number of things” would be dissected such as the thoughts of the British Royal Family on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. We’d track them down in their countless homes, in airports, in luxury gyms.
For the Mets, however, this current chapter of J-Rod would have been just as welcome as questions about Bernie Madoff.
A-Rod remains an important figure in the baseball world, both in his broadcast role and as a Major League Baseball figure who is arguably more famous (like his fellow retirees Derek Jeter and David Ortiz) than any active players. His past could very well keep him from ever owning a team. To overcome those opportunities, he must somehow force decision-makers to imagine much nicer scenarios than ugly ones.