The overlooked Steve Cohen Effect may just save the season

Player development, not high-priced signings, be what jolts the 2025 Mets.

When Steve Cohen first took over as the majority owner of the Mets, fans of the long beleaguered franchise immediately began dreaming big – and for good reason.

The organization had been mired in years of penny-pinching thanks to their former owners, the Wilpon family, getting wrapped up in the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme. What resulted was a consistent stream of home grown stars walking in free agency and the club almost never even bothering to feign interest in a single free agent of significance.

So when word got out that the franchise was going from that mess of a situation to being run by a man worth — at the time — over 14 billion dollars, fans of this team expected this organization to immediately be thrust into contender status off the backs of Yankees and Dodgers-like spending.

As we all know, that is not exactly how things worked out.

Don’t get me wrong, the fan base was not totally off base here. The Mets absolutely have spent money in a way that we have never come close to seeing around these parts. Since taking control of the team entering the 2021 offseason, Cohen’s Mets have spent close to $2 billion in free agency, far-and-away the highest in all of Major League Baseball.

But fans, and Cohen, quickly learned the hard way that there is a lot more that needs to happen to turn a team into a perennial contender than just signing big free agents.