PORT ST. LUCIE — Steve Cohen’s initial visit to spring training this year has left him convinced a special group is forming in the Mets’ clubhouse at Clover Park.
It’s a gut feeling — one Cohen can’t quantify other than to say it’s stronger than in his previous two seasons as the team’s owner.
“Walking around [Sunday], I felt an incredible vibe here,” Cohen said Monday morning, a day after his arrival to camp before he was expected to depart later in the afternoon. “I think this is the best vibe I have felt since I started this, being an owner. I am excited, this is a good-looking team.”
Asked to describe that “vibe,” Cohen pointed to the team’s cohesion.
“Just the players, how they feel about each other, they are having fun already,” Cohen said. “They are veterans, they kind of know the gig. I can’t tell you what it is, but I walked out of here yesterday going, ‘Wow, ‘I really like the way this place feels.’ ”
It’s a team set to begin the season with a MLB-record payroll of $364 million. That figure doesn’t include the extra $100 million the Mets will pay toward the competitive balance tax, but even with those numbers, Cohen says there isn’t a World Series-or-bust mentality surrounding the franchise.
Last year’s 101-win season that ended with a loss to the Padres in the NL wild-card series offered a reminder to Cohen that winning a championship is difficult.
Cohen half-jokingly chided himself for his comment upon buying the team in October 2020 that he would be disappointed if the Mets didn’t win a World Series title in three to five years.
“You know how hard it is to get to the World Series, right?” Cohen said. “We saw that last year, so the only thing you can do is put yourself in a position where good things can happen. You have got to make the playoffs. The team has got to be healthy, rested and ready to go and then you let the chips fall where they may. If you keep putting yourself there, one day we’ll get there. Obviously I would love it sooner than later, but I can’t control that.”
The Mets have a rebuilt starting rotation that includes Justin Verlander, who arrived on a two-year contract worth $86.7 million. That deal was struck after ace Jacob deGrom took a five-year contract from the Rangers worth $185 million, or roughly double the Mets’ initial offer.
Cohen delivered a subtle jab toward his former ace when asked if it might have made a difference if deGrom circled back to get a final offer from the Mets.
“I don’t want to speculate on what would have been,” Cohen said. “All I know, what I said about the vibe of this club, I really like it.”
But Cohen admitted he wasn’t prepared for the inflation in salaries this offseason. Other than Verlander, his big expenditures were Brandon Nimmo (eight years, $162 million), Edwin Diaz (five years, $102 million) and Kodai Senga (five years, $75 million).
“I was a little surprised that the prices had gone up for players more than I would have guessed, so it’s a fluid situation,” Cohen said. “We had some ideas on what we wanted to do and you always have contingency plans because you never know how it’s all going to play out, so you need a Plan A, Plan B, Plan C.
“But I’m really pleased with how it turned out. We had a lot of free agents and a lot of people to replace so it really turned out well. I am really excited by this team.”
As for the idea he is irking the rest of the sport by taking his payroll to record heights, Cohen said he was approached by cohorts at the most recent owners’ meetings who told him he was “100 percent right” in his approach.
“They laid down the rules and I am following them,” Cohen said. “In the end, and I think this is real important, when I measure my success as an owner, obviously you want to win a World Series, but I’m also going to measure my success on building a farm system so we can create sustainability year in and out.
“That is how you really create something that is special — the farm system being innovative and doing new things and taking good players and making them great. And if we can accomplish some of those things, and I think we can, that would be a marker of success for me.”
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