PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Steve Cohen is annoyed.
Remember six years ago during his first news conference as New York Mets owner? That’s right, he made it impossible to forget. That’s when Cohen said that if he didn’t win a World Series within five years, he’d be “slightly” disappointed.
Well, Cohen is entering his sixth season.
The previous five have all ended without the Mets winning the World Series. When Cohen arrived at Clover Park on Monday, he cracked jokes and maintained a neutral tone. That’s his usual style when talking to reporters. But he also tends to tell it like it is. The Mets, he said, haven’t won. So, yes, he is annoyed.
“I’m absolutely annoyed,” Cohen said. “Every year it goes by, I get frustrated. I’m really committed to this team. I know how much the fans care. I know we’re celebrating the 40th anniversary of 1986, and that’s just too long.”
Cohen’s quip about winning the World Series quickly into his ownership overshadowed his thesis in November 2020 about creating a sustainable winner. Fast forward five seasons and the Mets are the opposite. Nevermind winning the World Series. They’ve made the playoffs just twice: in 2022 and 2024.
Hence Cohen’s expectations after overhauling the roster and remaking nearly the entire coaching staff following last season’s historic collapse.
“Table stakes is making the playoffs — you’ve got to make the playoffs,” Cohen said when asked what success would look like in 2026. “I missed the playoffs last year. Missing two years in a row, that’s not good.”
Given Cohen’s investment in payroll, it would be especially bad for the Mets to again miss out on the postseason. For the fourth straight season, the Mets’ payroll is expected to check in at over $300 million (FanGraphs’ estimation for the 2026 payroll is $364 million).
Cohen cited the Mets’ 0-70 record when trailing after eight innings within the context of baseball randomness when asked about why the Mets didn’t make the playoffs in 2025.
After the season, however, Cohen authorized a major shakeup. Former franchise mainstays Pete Alonso, Edwin Díaz, Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil are each playing elsewhere. There’s a host of new accomplished veterans in their place: Bo Bichette, Freddy Peralta, Jorge Polanco, Devin Williams, Marcus Semien and Luis Robert Jr.
The new-look Mets excite Cohen.
“Saying goodbye is always tough,” Cohen said, “but saying hello is kind of fun.”
So, no, he isn’t annoyed about everything.
Cohen likes his team’s chances. He likes the new attributes of the club like contact hitting and likes that most of the new players are well-versed in winning. He attended manager Carlos Mendoza’s team meeting on Monday and said that he liked the room’s energy.
Of course, he’d like everything a lot more if it translated to wins.
“I’ve seen the ups and downs and so it’s not easy to build a team,” Cohen said. “You write it down on a piece of paper and that looks really great, but they have to play.”
That’s Cohen’s experience talking. He said he was more “seasoned” as an owner compared to the person in November 2020 who essentially declared not winning a World Series within five years a disappointment. From the outside, it appears the test for Cohen is balancing the idea of offering input, asking questions and maintaining player relationships with the idea of letting president of baseball operations David Stearns (the executive he waited on) and the rest of the front office members do their thing.
“I’m not picking the players — that’s the job of our baseball department, and I’m here to support that,” Cohen said. “There’s only so much I can do. Then the rest of it is the players we select and the way they play.”
While the Mets chase the playoffs and try to get the idea of a sustainable winner off the ground, the two-time defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers remain the class of Major League Baseball. In 2020, when asked if there was a model franchise, Cohen said he liked what the Dodgers were doing in terms of building a sustainable winner. In 2026, the Dodgers are doing it better than ever.
“They’re formidable, right?” Cohen said. “I mean, they have the ability to spend — so do I, by the way. They built a great team, but I think we’ve built a great team. We’re going to be really competitive this year, and the goal is to meet them somewhere along the way in the playoffs.”
As far as making winning more of a habit, Cohen accurately pointed out that when he took over “there was a lot of things to fix,” particularly with player development. The Mets’ farm system resides in a much better place. In theory, combining prospects with much more expensive and more experienced talent should create sustainability. The problem is, it hasn’t quite worked out that way yet.
“The idea is to keep putting yourself in that position year in, year out, which we haven’t done,” Cohen said. “It’s been off and on, and so we got to do better.”