Bad Start Doesn’t Concern Steve Cohen

Steve Cohen isn’t panicking about the winless Mets. But he won’t be afraid to cut his losses if things don’t look good, much like 2023. Also, he envisions a four-day work week, which should leave more time for his latest investment in golf.

“It’s only four games into the season,” the Mets owner told Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “It would be the equivalent of getting off to a bad start, let’s say in a hedge fund year you have a couple down days early in January. You still got a lot of time left to do what you normally do. Nobody wants to start zero and four. I mean, but you know it’s early and during the season you are going to have losing streaks. We just happen to have one at the beginning.”

By the way, don’t blame it all on Cohen.

“I’m not making the decisions,” he said. “My baseball people are making the decisions. My job is when they need me to support their decisions they come to me and say, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I’ve never said no to anything. I mean, we have discussions, and we talk about it, but … those ideas are not coming from me, which is totally different than running my hedge fund.

“My hedge fund, I’m much more involved but you know frankly in my hedge fund also we have 200 portfolio managers. I’m not telling them what to do either. I give them their risk limits and things like that and I’m always available if they need to discuss anything. So I’m used to operating in a very decentralized way and I give people a lot of rope.”

Sorkin asked Cohen, who has owned the Mets since 2020,  about the business side of baseball. The current collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season.

“I think we are in one of those moments in baseball where people are thinking about ‘OK, what do we like about the system, what we don’t.’ You’ve got 30 owners. You’ve got 30 different opinions. And so we are still trying to figure it out. There’s no doubt that small-market clubs aren’t crazy about large-market clubs spending a lot of money.”

So, Sorkin asked, does money buy championships? The Mets payroll is at $284 million, second in the sport, according to Spotrac.

“Clearly not because we tried that,” Cohen said, referring to last season. “The real problem is if you are trying to build a team through free agency, that’s such a tough place to be. You are fighting the aging curve. You are buying players based on their previous history, but they are getting older. As they get older, performance over time declines and so it’s a tough place to be. So what you really want to do is develop talent, which is no different than what I do in my hedge fund and that’s the similarities between the two.”

Cohen is famous in the hedge fund world for cutting his losses. Would he do the same in baseball?

“I kinda did it last year,” he said. “I looked at it and realized that the team was probably not gonna make the playoffs and even if it did, probably wasn’t gonna get very far in the playoffs. And so I think at that point we had a 15 percent chance of making the playoffs, a lot of teams in front of us. It would have been hard to pull off.

“I did a complete pivot and I think I shocked baseball in the extent that I did it. But for me, it’s just natural because I looked and said, ‘OK, I don’t like the positions I have,’ and so I wanted to make a change.”

Cohen told a visibly surprised Sorkin that he views owning the Mets as “philanthropy.”

“I do,” he said. “That’s why I bought the team. That’s exactly why I bought the team. I said in my original press conference if I can make millions of people happy, how cool is that? And so I actually view it as a civic responsibility.

“Listen, nobody wants to lose money forever and spend money and not have success. And to me, I deem success as not only winning the World Series, getting in the playoffs, and winning the World Series, it’s also developing a deep farm system that creates talent over the years over and over again.”

Cohen and his Cohen Private Ventures own the New York team of Tomorrow’s Golf League, a new six-team league that will begin play in 2025. Four players who will be part of the team, Xander Schauffele, Rickie Fowler, Cameron Young and Matthew Fitzpatrick, were announced yesterday. The sport has seen a lot of change in recent years with the founding of LIV Golf rivaling the PGA Tour.

“We think it’s a really interesting investment,” Cohen said. “Obviously, golf is at a moment where there is a lot of stuff going on that needs to be worked out. But we think we can work it out and we are excited to get involved and help the sport grow.”

He also thinks that there will soon be more time for golf.

“My belief is the four-day work week is coming,” he said. “Between the advent of AI, generally we hear from people that Friday … people are not as productive on Fridays, and so I just think it’s an eventuality. When it happens, hard to know. That should fit into a theme of more leisure for people, which means golf rounds will go up and interest will go up, and I guess courses will be crowded on Friday.”