The Steve Cohen Supplemental Draft

The Original Mets were stocked primarily by a legendarily threadbare expansion draft that left the Mets capable of winning one of every four games they’d play in their first year. With a full season’s experience under their collective belt, the Slightly Less Original Mets took the field for their second year and won eleven more times while losing on nine fewer occasions. From 1962 to 1963, the club’s improvement was glacial, but at least all rainouts were made up and pesky ties were averted.

Not good enough for what even the miserly National League would call progress. Sporting gentlemen that they were, the owners of the eight established clubs deigned to conduct a “special draft” for the benefit of both the Mets and their expansion counterpart Houston Colt .45s. The Colt .45s posted consecutive 96-loss seasons, an introduction which must have struck the 91-231 Mets as aspirational, but couldn’t be considered by any barometer other than comparison to what was going on in New York successful. Every existing pre-’62 team made available at least four players that the Mets or Colts could have for the low, low price of $30,000 each; the generous Reds put five guys up for grabs. Holding drafts was a handy way to shake loose unwanted personnel from your organization, and taking money from newbies was always welcome.

In October of 1961, the Mets and the Colts had no choice but to play along. In October of 1963, toughened by two years of getting beaten up by their elders, the junior franchises mostly said thanks, but no thanks. All of three players went in the special draft. The Mets, winning the coin toss, chose first and selected first base prospect Bill Haas from the Dodgers. In the Daily News, Dick Young judged Haas “the exciting pick,” in that “at least nothing is known of him, and he has a distinction uncommon” among those left by the curb for the taking: “He has not failed in the majors. He has not had the chance yet.”

Nor would he get that opportunity with the Mets. Twenty-year-old Haas, despite having blasted 57 homers out west in various Dodger outposts across two minor league campaigns and being a “big one” in terms of build, would not bust out in the Met system and would never see the majors. Houston’s lone selection already had. He was Claude Raymond, a reliever with ample experience as a Milwaukee Brave reliever. As usual, the Colts outlucked the Mets, with Raymond emerging as pretty darn effective for four seasons in Texas, peaking in 1966 by collecting 16 unofficial saves — they weren’t a recognized stat until ’69 — and making the All-Star team for the renamed Astros. The Braves, having moved to Atlanta and learned their lesson, traded for Raymond in 1967, holding onto him for two years until they could do him the favor of his life and send him to yet another new National League team, the Montreal Expos. The Expos’ 1969 record of 52-110 was of a piece with those the Mets and Colts put up in 1962, but what did Claude care? He was from Quebec, and he was pitching in the province where no other player naturally spoke the same language as the home team’s fans (though Le Grand Orange, Rusty Staub, made it his business to eventually learn French). Raymond would remain associated with the franchise, as a broadcaster and coach, almost without interruption until there ceased to be Montreal Expos in 2004.

Even the Sporting News couldn’t feign excitement, and it was the Bible of Baseball.

The final pick of the 1963 special draft, made by the Mets, didn’t have quite the same bilingual ramifications, but all told, it worked out pretty well. The Mets plucked five-year veteran Jack Fisher from the Giants, who themselves had traded with the Orioles to get him a year earlier. His claim to fame to that point was surrendering Roger Maris’s 60th home run of 1961. Wes Westrum, who had just been hired away from San Francisco to assist Casey Stengel, vouched for the 24-year-old selectee: “Fisher can be a good pitcher,” which in 1963, passed for a trustworthy scouting report. By April, Fisher was throwing the very first pitch in Shea Stadium history, “a strike on the outside corner” to the Pirates’ Dick Schofield, per Bob Murphy. In 1965, Jack started 36 games, still the franchise record for a single year. Tom Seaver tied the mark three times; unless you have the scoop on trends in starting pitcher usage reversing themselves, nobody will ever surpass the Fisher standard. The robust righty logged more than 900 innings in four seasons, piling up more than his share of losses (a Met pitcher’s occupational hazard for the bulk of the 1960s) and then was packaged with Tommy Davis to acquire Tommie Agee and Al Weis from the White Sox.

Given Agee’s and Weis’s respective contributions to capturing the 1969 world championship, credit George Weiss for playing the long game with the 1963 special draft. At the time, however, the Mets’ president wasn’t impressed with the entire enterprise. “The other names” on the list, Weiss judged, “were not any considerable improvement over what we have. They are not worth using up roster spaces that might better be used in the regular draft, and in trades this winter.” If you can’t offer up talent superior to that a 51-111 ballclub already claims, there might not be much point to tossing any more coins.

That was the last time any league conducted a roster enhancement exercise specifically intended to bolster Met personnel until the other day. The 2023 trade deadline wasn’t billed as a special draft and it wasn’t sanctioned solely or even partly for the betterment of the Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York, Inc., but you look at the results, and it’s hard to not think we just witnessed the Steve Cohen Supplemental Draft.

This one was for the Mets, and nobody else, not even Houston. Well, the Houstons were involved, as were their cross-state rivals in Arlington. You could include the operations in Miami, Milwaukee, Phoenix and Anaheim in the equation as well, though the Mets’ business with the organizations based in those places seemed fairly usual for this time of year: a guy not in long-term Met plans exchanged for a kid or more who may very well be soon enough. This is not to dismiss who we got for David Robertson, mensch among men Mark Canha, Tommy Pham or Dominic Leone (or what each individual gave us), but it was trading Justin Verlander to the Astros three days after trading Max Scherzer to the Rangers that made this a special draft. This was the draft with an entry fee only Cohen’s cash considerations could have covered once he nodded “uh-huh” to picking up so many millions of what is owed Scherzer and Verlander despite neither Max nor Justin any longer pitching for the Mets. Prices have gone up since 1963.

The names Marco Vargas, Ronald Hernandez, Luisangel Acuña, Justin Jarvis, Drew Gilbert, Ryan Clifford, Jeremiah Jackson and Jeremy Rodriguez might each individually carry singular meaning down the road. Collectively, they stand to outdo Bill Haas and Jack Fisher as special draft classes go, and that’s with Fisher having thrown all those innings. They have way more potential than the 22 fellas the Mets selected in October of 1961 did by October of 1961. No offense to the blessed memories of Hobie Landrith and Don Zimmer and everybody else the National League served up on a tarnished platter to the true Baby Mets. NL owners from Los Angeles to Philadelphia weren’t exposing who they were exposing to New York because they thought the Mets could use some promising young players. A few were relatively youthful and a couple crafted representative careers beyond 1962, but the crop didn’t contain much cream, and it’s not like Joan Payson could simply take out her checkbook and make monetary magic.

Steve Cohen can. It doesn’t always conjure a winning record. Witness 2023, when the payroll everybody loves to cite added up to a sub-.500 record by late July and little chance it was going to pay any competitive dividends. Thus, the special draft we just saw. Steve went out and got himself his very own prospect class, the way a few above-it-all baseball owners used to before the amateur draft was instituted in 1965. The idea of the June draft was to level the playing field so the teams with all the money and the scouting and the money and the glamour and the pinstripes and the money couldn’t just go out and sign everybody they wanted. A team like the Mets, who were wallowing in their fourth basement season, could now have a great chance to improve if they selected wisely and nurtured carefully.

Nearly sixty years later, that’s sometimes worked and sometimes hasn’t. What the Mets really needed come 2023 was an advantage over everybody else, which karma kind of owed them after the 1961 expansion draft. Perhaps that was karma spotted sitting at Steve’s table at 21 the other afternoon. I picture him at his booth, separated from the merely wealthy by a velvet rope, the maître d’ bringing him a telephone and Monsieur Cohen directing Billy Eppler, “no, I want TWO top-five prospects from the Astros — tell ’em that’s the penalty for finishing so far ahead of us in ’62…yeah, I call THAT the Cohen Tax!”

No, it probably didn’t happen that way, but it’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.

Mets owner Steve Cohen announces he has purchased the municipality of Kansas City, Mo., and plans to use it as a pied-à-terre.

In the reality of the moment, the Mets, carefully supplemented for all the years ahead when Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander are putting up their feet while polishing their Hall of Fame induction speeches, are currently stripped down to their shorts. It shouldn’t feel that way, given the several legitimate star types the Mets continue to employ, but in Kansas City Wednesday night, the operative word was yeesh. Seven, eight and nine in the Met batting order were second baseman Jonathan Arauz, center fielder Rafael Ortega and left fielder Danny Mendick. Their presence as one-third of a lineup in a major league game that counted drove me to examine the box score of July 23, 2015, the night of the notorious SOS — Save Our Season — lineup Terry Collins sent out to face Clayton Kershaw. That was the offensive attack that featured John Mayberry (.170/.235/.330) batting cleanup and Eric Campbell (.179/.305/.283) protecting him in the five-hole. The Mets were shut out on three hits, and, with the implicit cry for help having been heeded, the days ahead would bring Michael Conforto, Kelly Johnson, Juan Uribe and, ultimately, Yoenis Cespedes to Flushing. Season saved. Trade deadlines were so much more fun back then.

Thing is, despite immediately thinking of the world’s worst lineup when looking at Arauz, Ortega and Mendick, the lower portion of the Mets’ order eight years ago wasn’t so bad. Lucas Duda batted sixth. Juan Lagares batted seventh. Granted, dreamy Anthony Recker wasn’t exactly scalding the ball in the eighth slot (.130/.266/.241 entering that evening’s action) and the Bartolo Colon who had yet to homer batted ninth. But Colon was diligently working on his power stroke, and as with George Weiss, the long game would prove he knew what he was doing.

Arauz. Ortega. Mendick. Reed Garrett and Phil Bickford jogging in from the bullpen for good measure. These are the Mets — along with the more familiar Kodai Senga (5.2 literally muddy innings), Francisco Lindor (0-for-4 while leaving seven runners on base) and Mark Vientos (failing to score from second on Arauz’s surprise base hit after sliding somewhere behind rather than into home plate) — who lost to the Royals in Kansas City, 4-0. The Royals are essentially this year’s version of the 1962 Houston Colt .45s, until this week barely better than the nearly abandoned Oakland Athletics. The 1962 Mets lost 13 of 16 to the 1962 Colts, plus the one rainout and the one tie. The 2023 Mets have lost two in a row to the 2023 Royals. I’m sure there’s no connection. The 1962 Mets had more players one was likely to have heard of.

Buck Showalter brushes off questions about injuries or other misfortune with, “Nobody feels sorry for us.” I imagine there’s plenty of gleeful hand-rubbing around baseball over the Mets having fallen from the upper echelon of expectations. Steve Cohen signs whoever he wants. Steve Cohen converts whoever he signed who he no longer wants into his own personal supplemental draft. Steve Cohen flies into Kansas City, sits in the dugout between losses to the Royals, reminds reporters that the pre-Arauz/Ortega/Bickford Mets “had shown no consistency” and reiterates that “hope is not a strategy”. His summation of the Mets trade deadline activity didn’t exactly indicate the sentiments of a chastened gazillionaire:

We thought we got a great return for the people that we traded. We weren’t sure that was going to happen. I would’ve kept the players it if turned out it was going to be a mediocre return. It turned out that it’s a moment in time where other clubs are thinking very short-term, and I was thinking more intermediate and long-term. I was able to take advantage of that.

The process was breathtaking. The results are a while from occurring. In the interim, all those other general managers who sent the Mets top prospects believe they strengthened their teams to win the World Series this year. No more than one of them can be right, and it’s quite possible none of them will be. Then the intermediate and long term will kick in and the Mets’ supplemental draft class, along with the regular one from June, will continue to develop, and, unlike these games in Kansas City and the rest of this year, we’ll have something to look forward to.

Advantage Cohen? Money talks, but time has a way of telling.

National League Town has a way of telling the Mets’ trade deadline story, too. Listen in here.