Mets need to spend Steve Cohen’s money wisely, not outrageously

Steve Cohen’s money is only good for the New York Mets if it goes to the right players.

The Steve Cohen era of New York Mets baseball should look a lot different than the one under The Wilpon Reign of Terror. This is what all fans are hoping for. It can all begin this winter.

Some Mets fans have reached a point of delusion with this ownership change. For some reason, they believe Cohen outbid every other Major League Baseball owner just because he’s the wealthiest.

It doesn’t work that way. Players have to also choose to play for the Mets and there are plenty of extremely wealthy owners out there who aren’t consistently spending cash like the country is moving over to the gold-standard. The joy of seeing an ownership change has too many believing Cohen will play by different rules.

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I’m not here to rain on anyone’s parade. There certainly is hope under this next regime that things will turn out differently. The Mets take part in any major free agent sweepstakes and actually lock up their best players long-term through extensions.

More important than anything, the Mets need to spend Cohen’s money wisely. Whoever the general manager may be, smart contracts will go a lot further than rich ones.

Anyone can sit down and offer a $40 million per year deal to a top free agent. Odds are, if you handed out three of these, only one may come close to living up to those expectations. When all three fail, the Mets get into a bind and suddenly have two times a small market’s entire payroll devoted to three players.

I do believe we see Cohen and Company get aggressive this winter by at least attempting to break some type of record in free agency. A one-year deal with Trevor Bauer seems to make sense given his past comment about going after contracts that only last for a single season.

We’ll have to wait and see if Bauer is on their radar.

As big of a fan of the team as Cohen may be, it’s important he has someone helping him construct a major league roster. This could be one of the reasons why Sandy Alderson came back to the organization. You need baseball minds, not billions of dollars, to win in this sport.

I’d be curious to see how a team of the highest-paid players at every position would perform. Far too often, these kinds of deals backfire quickly and half of the contract is paying a man for his past performances.

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Money does not buy happiness or championships. Handling each of these well, however, can.