Can you imagine?
The new owners of the Mets on the Rock, relationship-related, before playing a regular season game?
Just 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 making the decision could imagine the risks involved in a J-Rod offer.
Look, Cohen won the Mets draw because he offered the most money, $ 2.4 billion. However, the rescue of that king did not exist in a vacuum. It served as the focal point for the launch of the hedge fund titan, one that A-Rod and J. Lo could not match even beyond total dollars:
Stability.
While Cohen fully funded his offering, the J-Rod group, you will recall, relied on a crowd of people, including Vincent Viola and Mike Repole. There was so much uncertainty about who would be the controlling person in the consortium that after Cohen and the Mets agreed on a price, Lopez told The Post’s Joel Sherman that he would take on the role of controlling person if the Mets re-entered the market. under Cohen he does not get sufficient acceptance from the other 29 owners; the owners approved Cohen last October 30th.
And if the prospect of the rupture of A-Rod and J. Lo did not reside at the forefront of the minds of baseball people, they could also contemplate the considerable transgressions of A-Rod involving illegal drugs to improve performance. . there, right? None of the mega-celebrities yet dominate the long-term relationship. The Dodgers, with the McCourts, and the Padres, with John Moores, are two teams that turned sideways as a result of the property divorces.
Although A-Rod and J. Lo are not married (they had been engaged and it is unclear if they are still engaged), it is not surprising that The Post’s, Dana Kennedy, quoted a source proclaiming, “Everyone who works in the business couple says mostly, “Thank God they didn’t buy the Mets.” They were referring to the “big disaster” of resolving things, but you can also imagine all the questions that would have been asked of Mets players. on the personal affairs of their new owners.
The Cohen era has not gone perfectly. The search for a baseball chief of operations took longer than expected and did not reach the superstar’s desired executives, and the person he eventually hired as general manager, Jared Porter, lasted just over ‘a month before she was fired for cause after ESPN reported her highly inappropriate journalistic behavior in 2016 (when Porter worked for the Cubs). Cohen, after showing his little-known sense of humor while engaging fans on Twitter, felt compelled to temporarily leave the social media platform after a tweet with Barstool founder Dave Portnoy about the GameStop’s rise resulted in alleged threats to his family.
None of these issues have been leaked at the Mets clubhouse press conferences or at Zoom, but Porter was no longer open for spring training and team president Sandy Alderson was present. brought on board by Cohen even before officially acquiring the equipment, he ensured that he would run smoothly enough.
The ownership of J-Rod would have been a blast, albeit a grueling one, for those of us in the press box. His most recent statement that “We are working on some things” would be dissected as the thoughts of the British royal family on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. We would be tracking them down to their myriad of high-end homes, airports, and gyms.
For the Mets, though, this current J-Rod chapter would have been as welcome as inquiries about Bernie Madoff.
A-Rod remains an important person in the world of baseball, both in his broadcasting role and in the figure of Major League Baseball, arguably more famous (like his retired teammates Derek Jeter and David Ortiz) than any active player. His past could never stop him from owning a team. To overcome these odds, you have to force decision makers to somehow imagine much more wonderful scenarios than the ugly ones.