Free-spending New York Mets owner Steve Cohen wants to win championship trophies in a Ruthian fashion, but being anything other than New York’s second team could prove to be much more difficult.
The Mets, National League runners-up to the eventual world champion Los Angeles Dodgers, significantly upgraded their roster over the weekend, coming to terms with prized free agent Juan Soto on a reported 15-year, $765 million contract.
The huge addition in Queens also marks a big subtraction sign just 10 miles away in the Bronx, where Soto spent last season with the 27-time World Series champion Yankees, who have long ruled Gotham’s baseball roost.
But while the Mets positioned themselves to possibly overtake the Yankees as New York's better baseball team in 2025, they may never be the more popular club.
"The Yankees have been around so long. No matter what the Mets do, they can't compete with that," former Mets and Yankees slugger Curtis Granderson told NBC News on Tuesday. "You just can't beat history and a fan base that's been there from your great grandparents to your grandparents to your parents, you know?"
A region’s second-place franchise can emerge from shadows if an owner is willing to shell out cash, Fordham University professor Mark Conrad said, citing the NBA’s Steve Ballmer, who has remarkably made L.A. Clippers games fashionable events.
“The focus of New York baseball could be shifting now,” said Conrad, who teaches sports law at Fordham’s business school.
“The Mets were run like a minor league team for years under [former owner Fred] Wilpon. And now you have [Cohen] coming with a Steve Ballmer mentality: ‘This is my thing, and I will do what it takes.’ It’s a new incarnation of a George Steinbrenner.”
Clive Belfield, an economics professor at Queens College, said he doubts the Mets or any other secondary team can overtake an established U.S. pro sports power in its local market.
However Belfield, citing the immense worldwide popularity of the English soccer club Manchester United versus the recent dynastic run of archrival Manchester City, said fans of those upstart teams shouldn’t care who sells more merchandise.
“If you’re a fan, what do you care about brand? What do you care that somebody halfway across the world has an old Wayne Rooney T-shirt on?” Belfield said, referring to Manchester United’s legendary goal scorer. “You just want to see the Mets on that coach going down the parade on the Canyon of Heroes after winning the World Series.”
In a sport in which local dominance — in terms of wins, attendance and overall buzz — matters, 2024 was a particularly difficult year for MLB's second fiddles.
- In Southern California, the L.A. Angels endured their seventh consecutive losing season. Halos fans also had to watch their onetime superstar Shohei Ohtani leave Anaheim for downtown L.A., where he led the Dodgers to their first full-season World Series title since 1988.
- The Chicago Cubs were slightly better than break-even at 83-79, in a mediocre campaign that would have drawn more Windy City rebukes if not for the historically bad White Sox. The Southsiders’ 41-121 season was the worst in modern baseball history.
- In Northern California, the San Francisco Giants stumbled to another losing season in 2024. But the NL West club was still given a massive economic prize as the cross-bay Oakland A’s left town, leaving the wealthy nine-county region as a one-team baseball monopoly.
- And even though the Mets enjoyed one of their best seasons in recent memory, they were still outdrawn at the box office by the AL champion Yankees, who went one step further in the playoffs than their rivals from Queens.
And even if the Mets, the White Sox and the Angels will never be the Yankees, the Cubs or the Dodgers, there are still plenty of wins and dollars to be had, Granderson said.
"When we were in the World Series [in 2015], there was a lot of blue and orange in the city. They are wearing it," said Granderson, who played four seasons for the Mets and four years for the Yankees. "So there's always room to grow your own fan base."
