WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?

NO LONGER THE LOLMETS, NEW YORK'S OTHER TEAM IS POISED TO MAKE THE PLAYOFFS. BUT AFTER THEY'VE SUFFERED SO MANY CONFOUNDING BLOWS, CAN ONE COMPETENT SEASON ERASE DECADES OF DYSFUNCTION?

- STEPHANIE APSTEIN

ONE OF HEPTADECABILLIONAIRE Steve Cohen’s first acts as owner of the Mets was to give almost everyone a raise. This was not actually his idea. Team president Sandy Alderson had spent nearly eight years as the club’s GM before stepping back to deal with a recurrence of an unspecified form of cancer, and when Cohen brought him back in 2020 and promoted him, one of the first items on Alderson’s to-do list was a dollar sign.

Alderson had initially joined the Mets in 2010 as a suggestion by the commissioner’s office to lend stability to a franchise reeling from the collapse of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme; the trustee for the victims sued then owner and major Madoff investor Fred Wilpon for 1 billion, saying that he knew or should have known the returns were fraudulent. Wilpon denied the allegations; in 12, he settled for 162 million.) Wilpon had to take out 65 million in loans, including 25 million from MLB, just to make payroll.

He began cutting costs anywhere he could, slashing player salary by more than 50 million in 2012, the deepest gash in major league history. Amid the chaos, Alderson lost employees to higher-paying teams. He will never know how many promising candidates turned him down because the Mets lowballed them.