Steve Cohen sure doesn’t seem to be sweating the most highly scrutinized player negotiations of his young Mets ownership.
The Mets’ rookie big boss showed off his playful Twitter side Friday night as his team took on the Nationals in Grapefruit League action at Clover Park in Port St. Lucie. With less than a week to go before recently acquired shortstop Francisco Lindor cuts off talks for a long-term extension, the industry’s richest owner Cohen tweeted: “What do [you] think Lindor will accept? I’m going to crowdsource the answer.”
When a fellow Twitter occupant named “Kyle Roberts” asked, “Can we assume a deal is imminent if you are poking fun at the task at hand?!” Cohen replied, “In this case no.”
Lindor, who can be a free agent after this season, and the Mets have been discussing a megadeal likely to top $300 million, the shortstop benchmark established a little more than two years ago when the Padres agreed to pay Manny Machado that amount over 10 years. Another Twitter user going by “Rafael Reyes” offered: “It will be 6 years 180 (million). If I’m right I better get some gear!!” Cohen replied, “I got a better shot at growing back (the) hair on my head.”
A third person, “James Derenzo,” tweeted at Cohen, “I hope you already came to [an] agreement that [you’re] tweeting this.” To that, Cohen countered, “I would never sign an agreement without your input.”
Cohen has shown off his comedian side previously on Twitter, though he exited the website for a while after an exchange with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy (concerning the GameStop stock surge) resulted in purported threats to his family.
While he’s new to this gig, it’s hard to imagine Cohen publicly joking around about a Lindor contract if the talks were going poorly.
