It's not my style to heap praise on a hedge fund manager, especially one who's had brushes with the law as part of his resume. But there's a small lesson about capitalism that can be learned by way of the management styles of the former and current owners of the New York Mets.
I adopted the Mets as my "other" favorite baseball time when I moved to New York a bit over 43 years ago. As an Orioles fan, I couldn't stand the Yankees, especially the Yankees' then-owner, George Steinbrenner, and the Mets seemed so perpetually hapless (with the ironic exception of their 1969 World Series defeat of the Orioles) that I felt they were worthy of my support. It seemed like an easy and sensible way to identify, from a rooting perspective, with my new home town.
As circumstances in my life changed, however, New York did not remain my home town for more than a few years. But, in that time, a few things had changed: not only the ownership of the Mets, but their management as well. The new owners brought in Frank Cashen, a former Orioles general manager, to rebuild a club that had spent three seasons in last place. And Cashen rebuilt the Mets the way he had helped to build the Orioles: one prospect, trade, and free-agency signing at the time. It took him five years to return the team to respectability, and two more after that to get them to a World Series win. But he, and the team he put together, did it. And so, even though I had long since left Queens, part of my baseball heart has remained in Flushing, even after Shea Stadium was replaced by Citi Field, a replacement that itself was the outcome of yet another change in ownership.
That change, by which minority owner Fred Wilpon bought out the interest in the Mets of Nelson Doubleday, whose publishing company had acquired a majority stake in the team, enabled Wilpon and Saul Katz to take charge of running it. That is to say, of running it into the ground, for it soon became clear that Wilpon did not have the financial resources to operate a major-league team in a baseball era of nine-figure payrolls. Nor did he have the acumen to manage the resources he had, a lack that can best be summed up in two words: Bernie Madoff. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Wilpon lacked the ability to understand that a sandlot-level appreciation of baseball did not translate into the ability to manage a major-league franchise. Professional baseball is precisely that: a profession. It requires people who have operated in it at a professional level to understand how it works. Wilpon never appreciated that. He made it clear in many heartbreaking ways that he respected no one's decision-making ability except his own. Why not? He was rich. Why should you question him?
And here's where we start to get a wee bit political. If you're wealthy, there are basically one of two ways that you can look at that circumstance. You can go through life taking the L'Oreal approach and tell everyone you're worth it, and watch your wealth fall about as you continue to seal yourself inside a willingness to learn nothing. Or you can remember that wealth, great or small, is based on a consistent ability to make good business transactions over time. It may not make you famous, but the financial security is much better. And the key to developing and maintaining that ability is to pay attention to what is going on around you. To listen. To understand what people want. And then, to find ways to give it to them.
Unfortunately, we now live in a world in which wealth is so concentrated in its ownership that those who have it no longer need to feel a need to listen to anyone except themselves. This is something that every consumer can see in his, her, or their everyday life. Fewer goods. Fewer places to shop. Fewer companies to work for. Even in an age in which entertainment/communications options seem to be exploding, the control of those options is limited to a handful of companies. Result? Our options consist of retreads of sequels of remakes of stuff you've already encountered in one form or another. In other words, safe choices. Safe, that is, for the interest of those at the top who make them.
Given all of this, Cohen, whose Wikipedia page describes him as the 30th richest person in the United States, and also as someone who business practices have led to a criminal rap sheet, does not seem like someone who would be a good example of someone who pays close attention to those who have less money than he has.
But his ownership of the Mets, thus far at least, has told a very different tale.
He has only owned the team for less than two full seasons, but, unlike Wilpon, he has managed to avoid making every mistake in the book. He has hired professional management with actual, professional baseball experience. He has listened to the people he hired when they told him to spend more up-front money than he was comfortable with spending at first. He has even gone so far as to swallow the cost of a player contract inherited from the Wilpon days, when his baseball people told him that it was the best baseball decision to make. The results in this summer's MLB standings speak for themselves.
And, perhaps most crucially, he has listen to the voices of the fans, fans who have decades of burn marks on their fandom from the Wilpon years. He asked them what they wanted from him. They told him they wanted to bring back Old Timers' Day, an occasion the Wilpons had allowed to lapse for 28 years.
When I heard that this was happening, and that it would happen on a weekend when I happened to be with my wife in New York, I was both astonished and pleased by the coincidence. But I was far more astonished--and disgusted--when I learned about the 28-year lapse. Twenty-eight years! This is a sport that celebrates its traditions and the players who built them to the point where it builds them into its marketing. This is at least true in the case of the better-run teams. For a long time, as I have said, and despite being in the nation's biggest market, the Mets were not one of those teams.
But I went to the Old Timers' Day event at Citi Field, and stayed for the regular Mets game afterwards (which they won, 3-0). And, to put it mildly, while using a word that comes up often in the context of the Mets, I was amazed.
There were Mets players, managers, and coaches from every era of the team's 60-year history, even going back to its first seasons at the Polo Grounds. (The Polo Grounds! It was almost enough to make me reach for a Knickerbocker beer!) There were Mets I had seen at Shea during my New York days, and there were Mets I had seen only on television, up until now. In particular, I got what might be my last in-person chance to see one of my favorite Mets I had seen at games I attended, John Stearns, who has been battling prostate cancer. As a two-sport athlete (baseball and football), he had a reputation for toughness that his appearance on Saturday only reinforced.
And then, the unexpected announcement that Willie Mays' uniform number 24 would finally be retired, as had been promised to him by Joan Payson, the original principal owner of the franchise, when she acquired him from the San Francisco Giants so that he could finish his career in the city where it started. Mays did not play long for the Mets, and his acquisition was, as much as anything, a nod to the nostalgia that helped lead to the Mets' creation when the Giants and Dodgers moved west. But the announcement was the clearest possible demonstration that Cohen's mandate in putting the day's events together must have been "Don't &%@#$! this up!" in the clearest possible manner.
Finally, there was the Old Timers' Game itself, a three-inning affair in which the obvious goal was to have fun, and not to pretend that there was a lot of major-league baseball left in the bodies of the players. (Then again, there were a few exceptions, like Mookie Wilson, also one of my favorite Mets players.) It was even preceded by another dose of Mets nostalgia: a recording of Jane Jarvis, the team's original organist, playing the National Anthem. As much as the fans in the stands (myself included) enjoyed watching the players play, it was so transparently obvious how much they enjoyed being there. So much so, in fact, that, when it time to take the team photo, the players requested that Cohen join them in posing for it.
Do you think those players would have done that for Fred Wilpon? Do you wonder, as I do, that maybe the reason for the nearly three-decade gap between Mets Old Timers' Days has something to do with the resentment those players had for the nickel-and-dime management that Wilpon gave to the team? Well, you might not have to. Just listen to Ray Knight.
Listening. Listening to each other. Learning from each other. That's actually what capitalism should be about. That's absolutely what democracy should be all about. That's one of the most basic lessons that our national pastime can teach us, as well as allowing us all to enjoy a great game. Hopefully, all of us can take in that lesson, and put it into practice.
Well done, current and former Mets. Well done, Steve Cohen. And a very special final shout-out to Jay Horwitz, the Mets' emeritus public relations person who had a big hand in putting the event together. He is living proof that, whatever the Mets have lacked from time to time in ownership, they have gone a long way in making up for it with what they've had in media relations.
It was Casey Stengel who said, in 1969 of the World Champion Mets, "Our team has finally caught up with our fans." Perhaps last Saturday is proof that, after six decades, the Mets' ownership has finally caught up with both.
Okay, it was more than a word or two. But I stand behind every one of them.
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