Steve Cohen: Glutton For Punishment

Feels like we’ve written this before, but, uh, Steve Cohen is buying the Mets.

Multiple sources confirmed to The Post late Friday night that the hedge fund billionaire is in exclusive talks to buy the Mets in a deal that is rumored to be in the ballpark of $2.4 billion, a figure that would be roughly $200 million less than what the $14 billion man offered the last time he agreed to buy the team, all the way back in December 2019…. Another source told The Post that Cohen’s bid was at least $100 million more than the next closest bid submitted by former Yankee Alex Rodriguez and entertainer Jennifer Lopez, who announced they had pulled out of the process in a statement.

That’s right, fair-weather fraud: If you’re going to come at the Big Guy, you better not miss, even if you do have Vince Viola on your side.

J-Rod tweeted that they were “disappointed” but “haven’t given up!!” And why would they? Just as easily as we can write “Steve Cohen is buying the Mets” on three separate occasions, we can write “Steve Cohen is not buying the Mets after all” for a third time.

The fact he won negotiating rights when the Wilpons did not really want to do business with him screams that he was willing to reach deeper into larger coffers than any of the other bidders…. With the Wilpons you never expect anything to go easily. The problem, though, is not Mets ownership as much as it is the 29 other owners. Cohen will ultimately need 23 yes votes for approval, and multiple executives in the sport anticipate there will be a few solid nos at the outset. Is that two or four or six? If it gets to eight, Cohen does not get the team…. A lot of owners did not want to deal with this outcome. Word was they were hoping the Wilpons would make life easy and pick the group led by Josh Harris and David Blitzer…. Cohen has had insider trading allegations and “Me Too” suits. Plus, he has the kind of fortune (estimated $15 billion) that can intimidate even the other rich owners for what he could do to blow out the Met payroll if he wanted.

Funny how none of that seemed to be a problem back in December, before the Wilpons threw their very Wilponsian hissy fit, as ever believing in spite of the mass of evidence to the contrary that they are smarter than everyone else and thus ought to be able to have their cake and eat it, too, by getting to hold on to the Mets’ lucrative TV network and allow COO and failson-in-chief Jeff Wilpon to continue running the team into the ground for five years after Cohen bought him and the rest of the family out, and then seeking to poison the well to ensure Cohen never got any Major League Baseball team, let alone their own. But Uncle Saul wasn’t going to let his nephew fuck this up again, and he also wasn’t going accept one (more) penny less than he had to, which made a humiliating return to the table with Cohen all but certain.

So let’s say (and allow Mets fans to dream for a moment) that the Wilpons and their buddies don’t cuck Cohen yet again. What does he have to look forward to?

The Mets had a 99.8 percent chance to win Sunday’s game after Urshela flew out for the second out of the seventh inning, according to the win probability data at FanGraphs. At that point the Yankees were down five with a runner on first. The next four batters reached base to tie the game, then the Yankees won it the next inning. For the Yankees, it was a 1-in-500 comeback.

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