No Wheeler; Less Wilpon; Now What?

When the rich guys meet for cocktails at the Rich Guys Club — which is where rich guys get together to tell each other how beautiful and brilliant they are — and one rich guy makes a deal to buy a baseball franchise from another rich guy, maybe one of the rich guys, after everybody’s shaken hands on everything that needs to be shaken on, could leave a large enough gratuity on the table so somebody can sign a frontline starting pitcher.

Or is that too shortsighted a priority for the rabble up here in the not-so-cheap seats?

I don’t know what to make of the news that Steve Cohen, very rich guy, is in negotiations to buy more than half of the Mets from the presumably doing OK for themselves Wilpons. I mean, yeah, hurrah for new blood, new money, a potential new attitude toward offseasons that Patti LaBelle herself would praise to high heavens. Cohen, if and when he takes over, shapes up on a thin sheet of paper as the kind of guy you’d want owning your team. I don’t want or need to know more than the part that says he can afford a baseball team and he’s committed to it being the best possible baseball team. People who have the means to buy professional sports franchises are different from you and me, and who are we — the ticket-buying, cable-subscribing, blog-penning public — to judge them and their outside-the-lines endeavors? Their job is to position the team we love to win and therefore make that team more lovable.

The best news about Cohen, in addition to his resources, is that he’s a Mets fan. Not a Mets fan because he already owns a minority stake in the Mets. Not a Mets fan in the sense that he politely applauds his investment. He’s a 63-year-old Mets fan originally from Great Neck, eight stops on the Port Washington line from Shea. I’ve read he attended games at the Polo Grounds, which means he’s old enough to remember the entirety of the Mets experience and young enough to not remember a time before the Mets. The latter shouldn’t feel like a positive, but after eleven seasons passing through the turnstiles of a ballpark whose guiding architectural principle was Ebbets Faux, I’ll take my chances on a baseball worldview shaped by love of the Mets and nobody else.

The least encouraging news is that this deal is by no means done. It’s supposed to take five years. Or less, depending on common sense and how rich guys operate. Five years sounds a little strange. Fred Wilpon sticking around for a half-decade as “control person” (the MLB acronym for owner that reads as both descriptive and chilling) when we are told Steve Cohen and his billions are en route sounds very strange. When I first heard these were the terms in play, I thought of the Season One episode of M*A*S*H in which everybody’s very certain there’s going to be a ceasefire…everybody but Trapper John, who rejects the rumor of peace “with all my cynical heart”.

“I’ll drink to it,” Trapper tells Hawkeye, “but I don’t believe it.” M*A*S*H, you may be aware, ran ten more seasons (plus a bloated finale movie), so Trapper was on to something there. And, by the way, anybody remember the name David Einhorn? He was the rich guy identified as the Mets’ owner-in-waiting in May of 2011. By September, that deal was dead.

If this does go through, though, it’s nice to think that when the Steve Cohen Mets encounter a baseball situation like the one that encountered the Fred & Jeff Wilpon Mets most recently, the Steve Cohen Mets will respond differently. The F&J Wilpon Mets had Zack Wheeler declaring free agency and fielding offers from all sorts of teams. Well, not all sorts of teams. The Met sort sat out pursuit of a pitcher who’d been very good for them the past couple of years and projected to be something similar a while longer. Zack just signed with Philadelphia, five years at $118 million total, a sum we’ll call Zack Wheeler money.

Maybe there are better options for the Mets than Zack Wheeler. I liked Zack Wheeler as a Met, but I could move on to another pitcher in his place. Who’s that gonna be? There are some fine pitchers out there on the market. I’d take Gerrit Cole, for example. He’s a major league free agent and the Mets are a major league franchise that isn’t paying Zack Wheeler anything. Cole would definitely loom as an upgrade.

Also as a fantasy in the F&J Wilpon Mets world. It’s never occurred to us to think the Mets, as run by their current control person and his right-hand son, would ever, ever, ever go after a pitcher like Cole who would command at least a Wheeler-and-a-half. That’s because we’re hyperconscious of who’s running the show and how they run it. But, hey, if a baseball decision were made that somewhere between Wheeler and Cole there’s an optimal answer for who will start games every fifth day, I’d be all for it. Walker Lockett ain’t it. Corey Oswalt ain’t it. Seth Lugo, unless you got a lot of relief pitching to take his spot, ain’t it. Any good ideas that will take wherewithal — the i is dotted with a dollar sign — are non-starters. That’s who the Mets figure to get to replace Zack Wheeler: a non-starter. When he arrives, we’ll be told it’s a creative choice.

The Steve Cohen Mets, had the clock truly started on their existence, might have extended Wheeler already. The Steve Cohen Mets might have said goodbye to Wheeler because they knew they were going hard after Cole or somebody else approximating his caliber. We don’t know what the Steve Cohen Mets would do. We don’t know for sure that there will be a Steve Cohen Mets. But if there are, I look forward to not even being aware that they’re the Steve Cohen Mets. In a decent-case scenario, they’ll just be the New York Mets whose control person will empower the baseball people to figure out who they need and tell them to do what it takes to get him. In an even better-case scenario, the next time we’d think about who’s in control will be when the control person shows up amid a couple of dozen heartily celebrating Mets to accept a many-flagged trophy from the commissioner.

That’s the best-case scenario, actually. I’d really like to see that.