Steve, I don’t know how you did it, but you somehow did it.
You may recall our interaction last September when I posted that you were losing the diehards and you should be worried. You even replied to it!
But Steve, we need to talk about this….
Now, what’s the excuse this time Steve? Was it the perfect 80 degree, non-humid sunny day?
You’ve done some good things. You did spend money. Even won 101 games one time. You have retired some numbers. You’ve tried to play catch-up with Mets History to the point of overdoing it (as you can now see, more than one number-retirement in a summer, heck its not even summer yet, is too much too fast).
And yet you’ve lost a lot of people.
On paper, Citi Field should have been filled yesterday. Instead you got 3/4 full (paid).
Maybe it’s because Strawberry’s time was a long time ago. This would be like retiring someone from the 1940’s at Shea in 1984. Maybe none of the millennials or Z’s care.
I think there’s something bigger.
You had a bad off-season. You had eliminated the clown show and had some professional vibes with Buck., but you and David let Counsell play you. Hard.
Mendoza, clearly not a first choice at all, hasn’t been a clown show, but I am not confident he will know how to avoid the circus when it comes. And in Queens, it always comes.
Whoever sold you on the Dance Team just doesn’t understand The Baseball Customer. There is no casual fan coming for a dance team Steve. The most popular parks are Wrigley and Fenway, and it’s not because of the fancy scoreboard ribbons.
You totally blew it destroying the museum. You need to put that back the way it was. Massive mistake, AND goes against everything you’ve been selling – HEY KIDS, METS HISTORY, RIGHT? Come see our tiny museum tucked away behind the remaining 50 t-shirt die-hards.
On the mis-marketing front, I think you are in a bind with this clown.
This week it appeared a guy got DFA’d for being misquoted by the media. Meanwhile, every third tweet is promoting the guy who told your CUSTOMERS basically to go to hell.
I understand that you don’t wanna / can’t eat $300,000,000. I get it. You also don’t have to market him. He might be “Mr. Smile” because he talks to the media, but he’s forever the above to me. He let us know what he thinks of us. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
So Steve, I don’t know what went wrong here. You really did try. You did get some things right, despite the last 6 months being your worst. But the attendance is the attendance. Seems at least a chunk of the revenue base has moved on to other things.
You played a big card yesterday. You have one more left, and can probably get 41,000 people to come see David Wright. After that….. good luck.
….
There was a time when I would have cleared my schedule to make sure I could do screen grabs and recaps of yesterday’s ceremony. There was a time when I would have made sure I was there. Take some pics. capture the scene.
On the blogging front, I’ve mentioned this before. People don’t go TO websites, websites come to them. You’re either reading this now because you’ve either been reading me for a long time, or Steve Cohen has responded to this and you’ve come here to call me an idiot.
Websites used to be able to amplify by using social media. Facebook then became basically pay-for-play, where even your own followers don’t see all your posts. Twitter got wrecked by Elon.
In the earlier days of blogging, you had someone like Matt Cerrone who would link to something he found compelling. The days of websites playing nice with each other and linking are long long gone.
So even if I sit here and kill myself to do through posts, nobody is going to see them, which is why I only post once a day now for this most part.
…
Perhaps a part of this is the changing nature of TV. My system (YoutubeTV) doesn’t even carry SNY. It took me about two months this season to remember that, as I didn’t even have a desire to put a Mets game on.
If you’re on Netflix, you’re never going to channel surf past a game. And these next two generations are watching streaming on their phones, not sitting on a couch channel hopping.
There are no casual baseball fans, and there really isn’t a road to acquiring casual fans, even if you do hire a fancy new Revenue Officer and send out a press release about him as if that’s supposed to excite anyone.
Maybe Steve picked the wrong decade to buy a baseball team.
The Media isn’t going to admit anything is wrong. You’d think Howie or Gary would wonder why the stands were 1/3 empty on a beautiful day, but they seem content to go along to get along. It’s all broken. Even me. Baseball is doing great.
Good luck with your baseball business Steve. It’s on fire.
…
This is the part of the post where I hear from the remaining 30,000 people. I will get tweet bombarded “I STILL GO TO GAMES” Cool. Awesome. Nothing in this post suggests that you shouldn’t. It’s just that there’s only 30,000 of you and there used to be at least 41,800 and I am from a time when there were 57,333 of us.
