After losing out on Kyle Tucker, Mets left trying to figure out how to save offseason of own doing

Only a couple of hours after Steve Cohen tweeted that he was looking for signs of smoke, a Vatican-style reference to the Mets waiting for an answer from Kyle Tucker, the Los Angeles Dodgers stunned him and the entire baseball world by signing the slugger to a deal worth $60 million a year on Thursday night.

So it’s almost too easy yet…the question begs to be asked: does Cohen want this smoke?

Or will he, like most other MLB teams now, hold his cards close to the vest and wait for the inevitable lockout and war over a salary cap that is coming after the 2026 season?

In short, the Mets probably thought they were raising the bar into rarefied air by offering Tucker, a very good hitter but hardly a superstar, $220 million over four years. And in some ways, they were. Only for the Dodgers to swat them aside almost dismissively.

Suffice to say, Cohen did no further tweeting on Thursday night.

And I’m not blaming him or the Mets for drawing a line at $55 million a year (their final offer) for Tucker, as absurd as that sounds. 

Yet, getting outbid must still be embarrassing in a way to Cohen. He’s a man who’s accustomed to getting what he wants, after all, even if it means spending obscene amounts of money for art pieces to add to his renowned collection.

As the richest billionaire owner in baseball, Cohen was supposed to be the death of baseball, remember?

Yes, the irony here is that this is what most other owners in the sport feared when Cohen said at his very first press conference as owner of the Mets that he wanted to model his organization after the Dodgers, that he might use his billions to create a new Evil Empire in Queens.

At the time, remember, the Dodgers were indeed a model organization that consistently drafted and developed home-grown talent in a way that allowed them to challenge for a championship every year without blowing the roof off the payroll.

Now it’s different, of course. Helped in large part by the Shohei Ohtani connection that has attracted other Japanese stars and his willingness to defer hundreds of millions of dollars on his $700-million contract, the Dodgers are now outspending the rest of baseball in a manner that may have made even the famously impulsive George Steinbrenner look like a piker were he still alive today.

Evil Empire? More like King Kong at this point.

Still, Cohen has the money if he wants to compete with the big, bad Dodgers. And none of this is to excuse the Mets for what has been an underwhelming offseason.

As it is, it’s hard to tell if their sudden all-out pursuit of Tucker was part of their plan all along or more of a realization they desperately needed a big-splash move as Mets fans showed their displeasure with their wallets.

Did they suddenly decide they better find someone to hit behind Juan Soto so he wouldn’t walk 150 times next season?

Wouldn’t it just have been easier to give Pete Alonso the $150 million over five years? He had made it clear he was willing to ease into the DH role, so I’ll never understand why the Mets drew such a hard line there.

They were willing to go three years but not five? It just never made sense, considering their need for a right-handed power hitter. And whatever their intentions at that time were regarding Tucker, they left themselves vulnerable one way or another.

And now, even if they change course and throw crazy money at Cody Bellinger, well, sure, he’d make them better in a lot of ways, but he wouldn’t fill the huge hole in the lineup behind Soto.

So it’s hard to see how they’re going to have anything resembling a championship-caliber offense, whether they go after Bellinger or not.

And if they were truly going all-in on run prevention, the David Stearns buzzword from the moment the 2025 season ended, why haven’t they made the expected moves to upgrade their pitching?

Dominant starting pitching and a lockdown bullpen would always offer hope of beating anyone, even the Dodgers, in a short series in October, yet the Mets haven’t gone that route either.

All along, I’ve said it wasn’t fair to judge Stearns until the offseason was over. And who knows, maybe now he’ll go out and trade for Freddy Peralta and sign Framber Valdez, and suddenly the Mets will have a starting rotation that can indeed beat anybody, especially if Nolan McLean blossoms into the ace everyone is now expecting.

But lest we forget, Edwin Diaz is now a Dodger, too. And while I’m laying some of that on Diaz for seemingly wanting to take the easy route to winning a championship ring, the Mets put themselves in a position to let it happen by not locking up their closer before LA ever got involved.

In truth, the most logical move at this point for Cohen might just be to hold onto his chips, save his money for Tarik Skubal next winter, or whenever the sport is open for business again, while seeing what McLean, Jonah Tong, Brandon Sproat, Carson Benge, Jett Williams and other top prospects look like by mid-summer as the trading deadline approaches.

I’m not saying the Dodgers are unbeatable. The Blue Jays were one hanging slider away from beating them in the World Series.

But it’s hard to see how the Mets, without dramatic pitching upgrades at the very minimum, can realistically compete with LA for a championship in 2026.

And right now that’s on Stearns. You can blame the Dodgers all you want for blowing up the sport and setting up a salary cap fight not only between owners and players, but owners and owners as well.

Yet the Mets shouldn’t be sitting here in mid-January trying to figure out how to save their offseason. If Stearns’ plan was to let the market come to him in search of the best value, which seems to be his M.O., well, it sure looks to be backfiring to the point where desperation is now part of the equation.

Desperation and the LA Dodgers, that is.