It was all fun and games with New York Mets owner Steve Cohen on Twitter for a while.
He’d send a joke or two, respond to fans and mix it up with them, solicit ideas for what the team should do on and off the field and build the kind of trust that Mets die-hards had hoped for when he bought the team from the Wilpon family.
But as the team has gone through a rough patch that started with the way Cohen and the Mets passed on signing 10th overall pick in the MLB Draft Kumar Rocker to the collapse on the field that has the Mets now in third place in the NL East, the tone has changed.
And on Wednesday, Cohen tweeted this:
It’s hard to understand how professional hitters can be this unproductive.The best teams have a more disciplined approach.The slugging and OPS numbers don’t lie.
— Steven Cohen (@StevenACohen2) August 18, 2021
That is a shot right into the clubhouse. That’s not some thinly-veiled, “we need to do better and we will do better” rhetoric meant to keep Mets fans from losing it more than they already are. This is something players — both with the not-so-Amazins and outside — will see and talk about.
Everyone within the organization knows there are some serious problems right now, and even though you could point to ace Jacob deGrom and the struggling Francisco Lindor being out due to injury as two reasons why the collapse happened, hitting the panic button now and so publicly can only damage trust of the front office by current players, and free agents might think twice if they see the top person in the organization outwardly slamming his own squad.
Baseball would be a different sport if MLB team owners spoke publicly anywhere near as often as players/coaches/executives do. Steve Cohen sure is taking up the torch on that one.
— Lindsey Adler (@lindseyadler) August 18, 2021
It’s also opening himself and the rest of the front office to plenty of criticism for the moves or lack thereof in the offseason and trade deadline (Javy Baez is batting just .171 since the trade from the Chicago Cubs):
Steve Cohen should simply not complain about the quality of his offense on Twitter, given that his Mets jumped the catching market to walk away with McCann instead of Realmuto and traded for Baez instead of Bryant. So much of this is self-inflicted.
— Nick Stellini (@StelliniTweets) August 18, 2021
I get it. He wants to show he’s not happy and express that fans shouldn’t put up with this kind of performance from a team with higher expectations in 2021. But this is the wrong way to go about it.
If you want to do deliver this message, do it to your general manager, who can then do with it what he thinks is best for the players. If you want to meet with the team itself to see what you can learn — and even that might seem weird to players — do that privately.
A public tweet with this kind of anger for all the world to see can only do more harm than good.
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