Billy Eppler was happy, he was effusive, he was conversational, he went out of his way to ingratiate himself to Mets fans and to say just about the nicest things anyone could possibly say about the great city of New York. Think I’m kidding?
“New York is a magical place,” the general manager of the Mets said. “It’s just awesome.”
So order up one of those old “I Heart New York” T-shirts for the new GM.
Of more intrigue Friday, when the Mets introduced Eppler and put an end to their extended search for a head of baseball operations, Steve Cohen reiterated much of what he said just over a year ago, on another Zoom call, when he all but walked into the virtual room, WWE style, flexed his biceps, threw his wallet on the table and declared: “I’m in.”
“My job is to provide resources for the baseball people,” Cohen said, “and to let the baseball people do their thing.”
He also said this: “It’s going to require spending, to get where we need to be.”
He also said this: “I told Billy I’m willing to pay for the right deal to get the players we need. We want to be competitive. We want to win our division and get deep into the playoffs and we have to field a team with the ability to do that. It’s whatever they need.”
(He also used the term “skillsets” when it came to Eppler, which might give certain Mets-ologists the bends. That was a favored term of Fred Wilpon, who used to have the job that Cohen has now. Cohen may wish to find a different favored term, for his own sake.)
So what we had Friday, in essence, was a Cohen Encore, and at least the promise from the Mets’ owner that he learned a few lessons in his first year running the baseball ship in Queens. Right now, we have to take him at his word, because there was little about those first 12 months that went according to plan, or went anywhere close to the way Mets fans were hoping they could go.
Cohen dabbled in a little humor Friday – “I learned that if you’re going to be in first place for 100 days try to do at the end of the season, not the middle. That would be helpful.”
He tried to be philosophical about the reason why the big-fish names all ran the other way at the start of the job search: “People have their reasons. And people have contracts. Let’s not forget this. They have contacts for a reason. When I give someone a contract I expect them to honor it, too.”
And he addressed his occasionally humorous but mostly enigmatic presence on social media: “It was new. it was novel. Owners haven’t done much of that. I was trying to connect with fans think I was successful with that.”
Although he admitted: “Twitter is a tough place. It tends to be combative.”
So is Billy Eppler’s beloved New York City, even if Eppler insisted Friday: “The city teaches patience.”
At its best, that’s actually true. If a business, a play, a musician or a ballclub proves to be worth the emotional investment, there is no better place for all of this to happen than New York. And there is no better way for the owner of a sports team to foster this attitude than to pledge the endless supply of resources that Cohen did last autumn, and did again Friday.
Now he needs to find a balance. That starts with truly trusting his baseball people, and at least on Friday he seemed 100-percent sold on Eppler, and on the dynamic between Eppler and Sandy Alderson. Eppler said he was merely waiting for the end of the Zoom call to dive into the pressing business at hand.
“For a small industry,” Cohen said of MLB, “there are a lot of moving parts.”
Cohen made his fortune, mostly, in private, even if he did acquire as large a profile as a man in his industry can attain. Hopefully what he learned in year one is that the best way to attain similar success in his new business is by having as small a public footprint as possible.
After all, let’s face it: John Mara was the most beloved man in town when the Giants were winning and you almost never saw his name in the paper. When teams are tire fires, that’s when the owners tend to find their way into the news. And that’s when they get roasted like suckling pigs. A lesson to be learned right there.
“If you interfere with every-day decisions,” Cohen said, “it’s not going to work.”
Perhaps we’ll remember that quote one day, when Billy Eppler lifts high a Commissioner’s Trophy and hands it to Cohen. Or we’ll remember it another way. George Steinbrenner, after all, once said, “I’ll stick to building ships.”