I was born in 1974 in New York City, and I’ve been a Mets fan ever since because that was my father’s team. I watched in 1986 when Mookie Wilson’s ground ball slid under Bill Buckner’s legs to tie Game 6 of the World Series, and I rejoiced when the Mets won it all in Game 7.
I lived and died with the 1999 and 2000 playoff teams featuring Mike Piazza, Robin Ventura and Edgardo Alfonso. I was at game 7 of the 2006 NLCS between the Mets and the St. Louis Cardinals when Endy Chavez made his incredible home-run saving catch over the wall, and when Yadier Molina subsequently drove one out for a home run and crushed Mets fans dreams.
And of course I loved the playoff runs of 2015 and 2016, with Yoenis Cespedes leading the power surge and Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom anchoring the pitching staff.
So it’s fair to say I’ve lived and died with this team over the past 35 years.
Which is why I find it so disturbing that Mets fans are celebrating the impending sale of the Mets from the financially-strapped Wilpon family to the billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen.
The Wilpons famously lost, depending on who you talk to, either hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars from their investments with the disgraced financier Bernie Madoff.
So it seems that eventually they decided to cash out, sell the team and reap the profits of a franchise they purchased 50% of in 1980 for $20 million, and the rest in 2002 for $135 million.
Ultimately they paid a total of $155 million for the Mets, and the team is now publicly valued at over $2.6 billion.
Not a bad investment.
It’s at least a 1,500% return. But that’s how oligarchs operate. Wikipedia defines an oligarch as “a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence.” Oligarchs are most typically associated with dominating Russia’s economy and politics, but as Bernie Sanders has made clear over and over since he came to public attention in 2015, oligarchs also dominate American politics and business.
Sanders is always talking about the oligarchy that runs America. The millionaires and billionaires. Well he’s absolutely right. The richest 1% of Americans control nearly 50% of the nation’s total wealth, a larger share than the so-called “middle class.”
And just three single individuals from the Walton family of the Walmart Corporation control over 40% of America’s wealth. If that isn’t an oligarchy, Russian-style, then I don’t know what is. You could also call it gangster capitalism. Donald Trump and his billions is the Gangster-In-Chief.
So who is this Steve Cohen, the new Mets owner? Well he’s a hedge fund manager from Connecticut, and he’s worth at least $9 billion. He lives in a huge 9-bedroom, 16-bathroom mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut.
In 2013, Cohen pleaded guilty to insider trading charges. He was banned from any involvement from his firm, SAC Capital, for two years. In 2018 he settled a civil suit against him and was allowed to resume activities at the firm.
Cohen also owns a private art collection valued at over $1 billion, much of which he circulates among the plush international offices of his hedge fund. So he’s taken a huge chunk of world-class art and made it private, essentially taking out of the public’s purview. Not cool.
But at the most fundamental level, not only is Cohen an oligarch, he’s also the head of one of the most socially destructive financial entities of modern American capitalism, namely the hedge fund.
Hedge funds pool massive investments fr0m wealthy financial firms, corporations, pensions and other funds, and individuals. In so doing they “hedge” market risk.
Unfortunately, however, hedge funds are notorious for acquiring major corporations, selling their assets, firing thousands of employees, and leaving devastated communities in their wake.
In addition, there is a strong belief among many economists that hedge funds contribute to instability in the financial markets and generally act as a socially destructive force within the nation.
So, my fellow Mets fans, this is the man who will be leading us into the future, into the great unknown.
Maybe he’s exactly the right man for the job. All the chatter is that because he has such deep pockets, he will aggressively spend to acquire those top-level free agents the penny-pinching Wilpons shied away from pursuing over the past decade.
If that’s the case, I’m all for Steve Cohen as the new Mets owner.
But let’s not deceive ourselves about our new savior.
He’s a gangster, pure and simple. Just like all the rest of the oligarchs.
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