Three evident realities highlight the New York Mets’ offseason. One of them is that they badly need competent starting pitching. The second one is that they, presumably, will have money to spend given they now have the richest owner in baseball in Steve Cohen and some money off the books. And the third one is that ace and Cy Young winner Trevor Bauer is available just for money.
Cohen just has a handful of days as the new chief of the New York Mets, and he is already making some fans in baseball. One of them, apparently, is Bauer. Ever since Cohen talked to the press a week ago, the free agent hurler was impressed with his overall leadership skills, ambition, and methods.
Bauer shared his thoughts about the Mets’ owner in a recent video he uploaded to his YouTube channel, titled “Steve Cohen’s BRILLIANT Start | Trevor Bauer Weighs in.” In the material, the pitcher praises four things that Cohen has done so far.
The first, and “most brilliant,” is the way he has connected with Mets fans on Twitter. Cohen opened an account and is constantly exchaging messages and interacting with people, answering questions, and even coming up with some genuinely funny responses.
“Ultimately, if you’re a businessman, if you own a company, if you are running an organization, you have customers. You have a product that you are trying to sell to the customer and you have customers that you hope will buy your product,” said Bauer.
“Unfortunately in baseball, this doesn’t happen very often. I mean, when was the last time that you can think of that you have an owner on Twitter asking the fans, his customers, what they want? … You got the owner of the Mets talking to fans on Twitter – that’s pretty cool,” he said.
There is mutual love between the Mets and Bauer
Bauer is also a fan of Cohen’s ambition. He said he wants to win a World Series in the next three to five years. That is, per Bauer, “outlin[ing] the what.”
“Everybody in the organization knows that we are going in this direction. … Whether that happens or not doesn’t matter,” Bauer said. “From a business perspective, that statement is all about aligning everybody’s interests and aligning everybody’s goal and vision in the same direction as the person who’s running the organization.
Bauer also said the Mets’ owner “defined the how.”
“He said ‘we’re gonna run it like my hedge fund. … They also said that we’re gonna get the best people in here. We’re not gonna micromanage. One person isn’t gonna try to do it all. We’re not just gonna have baseball people. We’re gonna have a lot of smart people in very niche areas. We’re gonna have a smart coach. … We’re gonna have smart analysts. … If you get people with very specific skillsets that are brilliant, and you put them all together as smart people in a room, the entire collective gets much smarter,” Bauer said.
And the final thing that Bauer loves about Cohen is how he is trying to distance the Mets from the Yankees.
“He wants a return on his investment in some way, shape, or form, and the best way to do that is to differentiate yourself enough from the competition that you can run in your own lane… Bring in your fans and do things your own way,” Bauer said.
The love appears to be mutual, considering how New York Mets’ president Sandy Alderson praised Bauer’s personality. Is it possible that they sign the star pitcher this offseason?