As the presumptive new owner of the Mets last week, Steven A. Cohen spent days answering fans’ questions on Twitter. The Mets’ loyalists, he wrote, are the “most knowledgeable fans around” — and Cohen has always been one of them.

On Friday, when he closed on a record $2.475 billion purchase of his favorite team, Cohen started his tenure with precisely the kind of move a frustrated Mets fan would make, clearing out a front office that had failed to take the Mets back to the postseason. Cohen fired five members of the baseball operations staff, including General Manager Brodie Van Wagenen, three assistants and the player development director, Jared Banner.

Sandy Alderson, the Mets’ former general manager and new team president, will hire a fresh front-office team supported by not just Cohen’s billions, but also his drive. At a time when other owners will show caution after a season without ticket sales, the Mets are positioned to spend the way they rarely did after the Bernard L. Madoff scandal ravaged the Wilpon family finances.

The Cohen developments were part of an impressive news dump around Major League Baseball on Friday, joining the league’s decision not to punish Justin Turner for celebrating the World Series title last week with his Dodgers teammates, despite having just tested positive for the coronavirus, and the return of Alex Cora to manage the Boston Red Sox. All three stories, in a way, were underscored by a quality too often missing these days: mercy.

Source: New York Times

Powered by NewsAPI.org