THE END OF THE METS? THE END OF THE WORST BASEBALL SPENDERS EVER

There is nothing you can do about the Mets, who just played some of the worst baseball of an all-time leading ballclub and have nothing to do but figure out the derivative of the awful

     So that’ll be it, the end of the New York Mets, the scrawl of the most-watched partnership in the history of Major League Baseball. That’ll be it for Steve Cohen, still on tap to pay more than $400 million this season. Will he make it a four? Will he make it a five?

     Why even try. Maybe you just suck at what you do.

     “It’s incredibly frustrating,” he said of the 49-54 Mets, who have spent the last two days trading Max Scherzer and David Robertson. “It’s kind of weird. It’s very strange to me. There’s nobody to blame. It’s really across the whole team.”

     It’s disturbing that the Mets are closer to the last-place Washington Nationals — who are rebuilding, though we aren’t sure why — than the third-place Miami Marlins. It is beyond disturbing that the Mets are under .500, right there with the San Diego Padres, who put up the third-best financial numbers beside the Mets and New York Yankees and are still shy of the American League’s final wild-card spot. How is it possible these three teams are out of the playoffs, entirely, which makes this a season past any we’ve seen in a long time?

     “Disappointed. I mean, obviously, we put ourselves in this position. We haven't played well enough as a team," Scherzer said. “I’ve had a hand in that for why we're in the position. Can't get mad at anybody but yourself, but it stinks.”

     Wait, wasn’t it in the offseason where someone famous said Cohen will change the game? “He will revolutionize this game,” said Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and a close friend who sits on the Mets’ board.

     Oh, he’ll outrage it. He’ll sicken it. He sent Scherzer to his sixth major-league team, which doesn’t sit well for the future Hall of Fame board considering three have been in a season and two-thirds. Only 360 days from his 40th birthday, he hasn’t pitched well this year, with 23 home runs in 107 2/3 innings and 19 starts. Maybe he’ll pitch better for his next team. Maybe he won’t, considering the Los Angeles Dodgers expected more than what he gave two years ago.

     This is a very strange, very unusual season in the sport. Scherzer is off to the Texas Rangers, who never have won a World Series dating to 1972, which is 50 seasons ago. In short, this is the crawl of the Rangers and possibly the Brewers, who also haven’t won since 1972, so why not them try together? I can’t tell you more than the names on the All-Star Game shirts. Other than that, the Mets had one, Pete Alfonso, who played in the Home Run Derby but is hitting .220.

     Other than the ascent of the Braves, who have the weight of the 2021 World Series in their sights, will the Dodgers sign Nolan Arenado? That can’t stop their relief problems, but can they make another run at a World Series? Maybe they can. Maybe they can’t. Does anyone care?

     What I know is, I went to a game the other night with 49,000 in the house. People are going back, at least for now, and are going to enjoy it. I don’t care about the Mets. I don’t care about their finances. But I do care about their general ownership, which now goes back a long, long time ago. “If I’m looking at ’24 with a similar team, one year older, for a veteran team, probably not a great place to be,” Cohen said. “We have to make honest, truthful judgments.”

     Yech.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.