On Friday MLB owners will vote on whether Steve Cohen will join their ranks. The hedge fund billionaire reached an agreement to buy the New York Mets in September, pending approval from his potential peers and the league. The purchase also may require sign-off from New York City because Citi Field, the Mets’ home field, sits on city-owned land. On Wednesday night a couple of reports suggested that Mayor Bill de Blasio was dead set on getting in the way.
The New York Post reported that de Blasio called MLB commissioner Rob Manfred earlier this month and told him that he opposed the deal and would prevent it from being finalized by using the city’s control of the Citi Field lease. SNY seconded the report an hour later.
It’s not entirely clear, though, that de Blasio plans to block the deal, or that he can. “The Mayor did call Commissioner Manfred, but the rest of this isn’t true,” Bill Neidhardt, a spokesman for City Hall, tweeted in response to the Post report. “The NYC Law Dept is doing their due diligence of examining a new lease on incredibly valuable city-owned land. That’s what the call was about.” A source from Cohen’s camp told amNewYork, in response to Wednesday’s reports, “Not worried.” Cohen is widely expected to receive the approval of MLB owners, with the New York Daily News reporting on Tuesday that only two owners are currently on the fence and that there was only one expected no vote at that time. (Cohen needs at least 22 out of 29 votes to be approved.)
For his part, de Blasio left it somewhat open-ended in a press conference on Thursday. “It’s our land,” he told reporters when asked about the sale, according to the Associated Press (which noted that the mayor is a Boston Red Sox fan). “There is a legal requirement that if there’s an ownership change it has to be evaluated. Our law department is doing that evaluation based on the law.”
According to the AP, the mayor wouldn’t comment on whether he thought Cohen was a fit owner, but coverage of the battle, to the extent that one truly exists, has focused on how Cohen’s former company SAC Capital paid $1.8 billion in fines after it pleaded guilty to wire and securities fraud in 2013. The Mets’ lease states, according to the Post, that the city can step in if a prospective team owner is a “prohibited person,” which means anyone who’s been “convicted in a criminal proceeding for a felony or any crime involving moral turpitude.” Strictly speaking, Cohen has never been charged with a crime, but he was required to shut down SAC after the firm’s conviction and he wasn’t allowed to manage investor money again until 2018. “After the company pleaded guilty to the charges and the penalties were paid,” The New Yorker’s Sheelah Kolhatkar wrote earlier this week, “Cohen became a symbol of Wall Street malfeasance.”
More recently, Cohen’s new fund, Point72, has been accused of gender discrimination, as Kolhatkar noted, with two women filing grievances with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities in the last seven months. A third woman, Lauren Bonner, settled a federal discrimination lawsuit against Point72 last month. (As The New Yorker noted, the firm has said that there were “no adverse findings” against Cohen or the company.)
“It just seems so messed up,” Jeanne Christensen, a lawyer representing Bonner and one of the other women who filed a grievance against Point72, told The New Yorker. “You have little kids all across the country and parents who spend all their extra money on little Johnny so he might possibly get a scholarship to college, to play baseball, so that maybe he can make it to a minor-league team. It’s, like, the dream. And you’re doing that only to answer to some guy like Cohen?”
Enthusiasm for Cohen, a deep-pocketed, lifelong Mets fan, to take over the team has endured, at least in part due to the organization’s extensive record of dysfunction and losing. “Mets fans have been tortured for too long to have this glimmer of hope snatched at the last moment,” City Councilman Keith Powers told the Post on Wednesday. “The Law Department should be reviewing this under the rules. If this is a political excursion to make sure one person can’t buy a team, that feels out of bounds to me.” On Thursday former New York Yankee Reggie Jackson tweeted, “Wishing my friend and New Yorker Steve Cohen, a successful MLB vote Friday to join Baseballs fraternity,” adding, “He’s wanted the team since the day I ‘Met’ him. I’m sure he’ll get the great Met franchise back on its winning ways.”
The perception that de Blasio could interfere with the team’s future success has also been fodder for Mets fans to take aim at what was already an easy target. “De Blasio needs bad P.R. like he needs a hole in the head,” amNY’s source said on Wednesday. “He has targeted you, Mets fans,” a columnist for the Post wrote.