NEW YORK — The Mets losses this season have often been of the painful variety.
Mets owner Steve Cohen compared this season’s team to the competitors on a dog track. As soon as they appear poised to capture the elusive prize, it fades out of reach.
Unlike the 2022 season when everything appeared to go the Mets’ way, consistent success has eluded them throughout the 2023 season. The result of those inefficiencies placed the Mets at 36-43 ahead of Wednesday’s game as Cohen addressed the media for the first time since Opening Day at Citi Field on April 7.
“They’re not performing up to the level that they, themselves, would have expected for a multitude of reasons, individual issues,” Cohen said. “They want it as much as anybody else. They’re just gonna have to get their act together. They’re gonna have to act like a team. They’re gonna have to support each other. This not an easy task, it’s gonna require a real commitment.”
Cohen called the results of the Mets’ opening half of the season “terrible,” but struck a calculated and cautious tone when it comes to making hasty decisions to turn things around. Here are the major takeaways from Cohen’s address in the midst of the Mets’ poor performances:
Buck Showalter and Billy Eppler are safe for remainder of 2023
As the Mets dropped six of their last seven series, the Mets’ fans began to call for a change of leadership.
Cohen shut down those rumors on Wednesday. When asked if manager Buck Showalter and general manager Billy Eppler would remain in their jobs through the 2023 season, Cohen unequivocally said: “Absolutely.”
The Mets owner believes that a dramatic change at the top would set a bad precedent for the future success of the franchise.
“I’m a patient guy. Everybody wants a headline. Everybody says, ‘Fire this person. Fire that person,’ but I don’t see that as a way to operate,” Cohen said. “If you want to attract good people to this organization, the worst thing you can do is be impulsive and win the headline for the day, and overall over time, you’re not going to attract the best talent because they’re not going to want to work with somebody who has a short fuse.”
After Cohen’s address, Showalter said that vote of confidence does not change his approach to seeking success.
Does the spending continue? And will the Mets buy or sell?
Cohen has not allowed himself to think of a scenario in which the Mets finish in fourth place in the National League East, but he said that he has begun preparing the team’s management for all situations ahead of the trade deadline.
Last week’s trade of Eduardo Escobar for a pair of pitching prospects showed a certain philosophy about Cohen’s spending. He views the contracts of his players as money already spent, so in a seller’s situation, the team could use those contracts to acquire talent to fill the minor league ranks with the hopes that will eventually help lower the payroll in the future.
Much of the Mets’ spending over the last two seasons came in the pitching ranks as Cohen and the front office looked to fill what they viewed as arguably the biggest voids throughout the organization.
“The goal is to provide all the resources, all the infrastructure that makes us competitive with other teams,” Cohen said. “And then it’s upon us to take those tools and use them and either pick good players and/or make them better. That’s the goal and that takes time.”
Cohen said his willingness to spend comes in an effort to bridge the gap until the young talent develops, but he doesn’t see it as sustainable in the long-term.
So, if the Mets were still seven games below .500 and 8.5 games out of the final NL Wild Card spot on the Aug. 1 trade deadline, would Cohen look to bolster this season’s major-league roster?
“If I’m in this position, I’m not adding,” Cohen said. “I think that would be pretty silly.”
The search for a president of baseball operations is on
Cohen has continued the search for a president of baseball operations, along with a Mets president and CEO, after Mets president Sandy Alderson stepped aside in September 2022.
But Cohen is not going to rush towards the wrong option.
“The type of person I want doesn’t grow on trees. I have to be patient,” Cohen said. “The worst thing I can do is to hire somebody in that role that I’m settling on.
“Listen, I was lucky enough to find Billy two years ago. It was really difficult to go and find anybody to run this team, which is kind of remarkable. It’s a New York team, but because of the nature of trying to find people in baseball it’s not easy.”
The Mets have come up empty in their search for a president of baseball operations in recent years, after the Brewers denied them an interview with David Stearns in 2021, along with Theo Epstein and Billy Beane declining interviews.
The new hire would operate above Eppler in the Mets’ front office.
“At some point, someone’s gonna come available,'” Cohen said. “It’s not going to continue this way forever. At the same time, we’re making massive improvements that the fans don’t see in the people we’re hiring, the coaches, the people in the farm system.”
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Steve Cohen on Buck Showalter, and Mets trade deadline plans