“I’d Like to Get on a Winning Streak—That’d Be Fun”: Steve Cohen on Bringing Contemporary Art to the Mets

On a Saturday afternoon in late May, the artist Joel Mesler was standing by the Mets dugout at Citi Field before the start of the day game against the San Francisco Giants, holding a ball in his hand, glancing up at the 30,000 people in the stands. Jets taking off from LaGuardia torpedoed into the sky, and the breeze near home plate smelled like sausages. The first half of the crowd had snagged the limited edition giveaway tote bag designed by Mesler—a canvas tote with a painting of inflatable baseballs floating on top of a pool, with Mesler’s signature text bubble popping atop it: “NEW YORK.” He was wearing a jersey with “MESLER” emblazoned on the back, tossing the ball in and out of his hand, mentally preparing to throw out the first pitch at a Mets game. He hadn’t taken the mound, or even played catch, since he was in the game as a teenager.

“I haven’t practiced,” Mesler said. “But I could have gone pro, if I didn’t start dropping acid in high school. I was throwing a 75-mile-per-hour fastball.”

There is a reason why Mesler—an artist turned art dealer turned artist again who shows at blue-chip galleries and has work that’s sold for nearly $1 million at auction—was throwing out the first pitch at the Mets game, and that reason is Steve Cohen. Before Cohen spent $2.4 billion to own 95% of the Mets and then hundreds of millions to build the league’s highest payroll, he blitzed through the art world and positioned himself as a reliably insatiable art collector. He has a museum-worthy trove that years ago was estimated at $1 billion. Quality-wise, it’s considered one of the best in the country, if not the world.

And so naturally, he invites his art friends to watch his ball club sometimes. Last year, artists such as Mesler, Rashid Johnson, and Jeff Koons joined Cohen in the owner’s box that hovers over home plate. Along with his daughter Sophia Cohen, an adviser to Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and founder of the recently established advisory and curatorial firm Siren Projects, the artists jammed about how they could get involved with the Mets, and with baseball. This is a relatively novel phenomenon. Dealer-collector Jeffrey Loria has at different points owned the Montreal Expos and Miami Marlins, and he festooned the latter’s new stadium with contemporary work, somewhat controversially, but has been out of baseball since selling the team in 2017. NBA players often collect art, and teams in the league have commissioned artists to design their City Edition jerseys (specifically the Clippers and the Nets, which tapped Jonas Wood and KAWS, respectively), but baseball, that most staid of America’s big pro sports outfits, doesn’t really do art.

So Cohen decided that Mesler would make a new painting that could be slapped on a tote bag, and Johnson—one of the most celebrated artists of his generation, whose newer works can sell for low-seven-figure prices—would make a bucket hat featuring one of his signature “anxious men” motifs. Sarah Sze, who’s repped by Gagosian and was the US artist at the Venice Biennale in 2013, would design a ballcap. And maybe somehow, giving away a number of editioned artworks that could conceivably have real value—that could translate, through karma, into some wins?

“My daughter started just spitballing and we came up with this idea, and we figured we’d experiment with it and try it,” Cohen told me over the phone the day before the game.

Originally, Cohen was planning on being there to watch Mesler throw the first pitch, but work intervened and he wasn’t able to attend in person. But he wanted to explain his thinking behind all these giveaways, and how artists could play an even bigger role in the Mets going forward.

I’ll note here that our conversation happened days before an incredibly eventful week in Flushing. On Tuesday, New York state senator Jessica Ramos said she had decided not to introduce legislation that would allow Cohen and his partners to build a Hard Rock–branded casino project next to Citi Field, making the plan in its current form difficult-to-impossible to pull off. It was a blow to a long-held dream of Cohen’s. A spokesperson for the proposal told The New York Times that the Mets owner intended to push forward with the casino regardless.

Then on Wednesday, the team, which has struggled mightily in 2024, saw topflight closer Edwin Díaz head to the injury list and star first baseman Pete Alonso undergo an MRI on his wrist. Also: Relief pitcher Jorge López was ejected from a game, threw his glove into the stands, and appeared to visibly vent his frustration about being on “the worst team in probably…the whole fucking MLB.” (He was swiftly designated for assignment after the game, which saw the Mets lose to the Dodgers.) Rough stuff to be 16 games out of first place after Memorial Day—even in what was widely expected to be a rebuilding year.

Anyway: Let’s talk art!

“It’s new, it’s different, it’s an experiment. We’ll see how it goes,” Cohen said to me. “The participation of the artists and their excitement around it is great. They love baseball—Rashid is a huge Cubs fan, and Joel loves baseball. And so it’s a way of kind of creating an intersection between two subcultures, and hopefully our fans will enjoy it.”

In the hours before the game, Mesler had been anticipating the pitch. Yes, he was a former high school baseball player, but in the wake of family trauma, he was led toward the studio. He tried for decades to make it as an artist, but found more success in selling other people’s art than in making his own—only to get sober in his early 40s, woodshed his technique, find his mantra, and achieve the massive success on canvas that had eluded him for decades. And that wild journey now included a waypoint on the mound at Citi Field, with his wife and kids standing on the field and his close friends and colleagues looking on from a big luxury box, enjoying free hot dogs and unlimited Shake Shack.

Now he just had to make it over the plate. The day before the game, Cohen told me I should bet on whether Mesler’s pitch would make it.

“I think he’s been practicing?” I said, unaware that he had not.

“That’s not true,” Cohen said with a laugh. “Wait to see what happens.”

Perhaps it was inevitable that Cohen would bring the art world into baseball. While he still oversees day-to-day operations of his hedge fund, Point72, Cohen has devoted the entirety of his public persona to the Mets. Early on, when he was lavishing huge-money contracts on the likes of Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, fans had taken to calling him “Uncle Steve” on the call-in shows—an only partly ironic nod to his largesse after years of more austere ownership. That love has curdled slightly, as those contracts have proven to be albatrosses and the team is in the midst of a potentially long turnaround. Cohen loves to dive into the cesspool of fanboys that is his follower base on X, scrapping it up in the comments with users who boast, oh, double-digit follower counts. True Mets-fan stuff.

The other great cornerstone of Cohen’s persona has been art. Sources say he buys from galleries frequently, either directly himself or through his advisers. He’s a frequent presence at museum galas and gallery openings, and gave $50 million to the Museum of Modern Art during its renovation project in the 2010s. When you take the elevators to the shiny sixth floor of MoMA, you find yourself in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions.

He started collecting in the early 2000s, swept up in the mania of new paintings when his trader buddies started bragging about their purchases. “I got the art-collecting bug through people I knew at my firm who were collecting, and I started going down with them to auction houses and then I got hooked,” he told me.

In 2010, Cohen bought Jasper Johns’s Flag from the son of legendary dealer Leo Castelli for a reported $110 million. In 2013, Cohen bought Picasso’s Le Rêve from Steve Wynn for $155 million. In 2015, Cohen bought Giacometti’s L’Homme au doigt for $141.3 million, a record price for a sculpture at auction.

But he was a Mets fan long before that, taking the train in from Great Neck to see games at the ancient Polo Grounds, and then at Shea Stadium, remaining a fan as his acumen at the trading desk led him to eventually start his own firm. (SAC Capital Advisors closed in 2016 after the firm pleaded guilty to insider trading charges and agreed to pay $1.8 billion in fines, though Cohen was never personally charged.) His current fund, Point72, handles more than $30 billion in assets, and Cohen is worth nearly $20 billion himself. As it’s often pointed out, Cohen is the inspiration for the Bobby Axelrod character on Showtime’s Billions.

Cohen seems to genuinely connect with the living artists in his collection, especially if there’s a baseball tie-in. While Cohen was running SAC in Greenwich, Mesler was growing up in Los Angeles; he became a baseball fan during his parents’ historically contentious divorce, cementing a love of the Dodgers and a love of baseball card collecting. Selling baseball cards led to selling prescription drugs found around the house, which gave him the flair for salesmanship later needed to be a wheeler-dealer gallery owner slinging canvases. After turning his back on his studio practice in 2003, he started a ramshackle gallery model that operated in Los Angeles and then New York; during the 10 years of operation, he helped launch artists such as Henry Taylor, now a global superstar with blockbuster shows at the Whitney. Mesler met Taylor when he had the gallery in LA’s Chinatown, as Taylor walked in trying to sell paintings he’d made on cigarette boxes. Mesler bought two for $80.

Fast-forward to 2024, and Mesler is ready to open shows at the landmarked Beaux-Arts townhouse headquarters of Upper East Side gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan, and his installation will take over Rockefeller Center in July. More than a dozen of his paintings have sold at auction in the six figures, including one that sold for more than $900,000. One of his paintings is called Home Run and features “HOME RUN” in large balloon-like letters, a recognizable Mesler signature. After Cohen and his daughter Sophia approached Mesler about making merch, he came up with the baseball-as-balloon motif, with the text saying “NEW YORK” to float in the middle.

Mesler also signed a number of the bags, pushing the limited edition collectibles even closer to editioned-artwork status. When asked about flipping them, Mesler encouraged fans to take a signed bag and try to sell it—who knows, maybe a Mets giveaway can help create a new generation of art collectors and dealers. Cohen also acknowledged that it’s just a little bit more special to have stuff made by someone like Joel Mesler or Rashid Johnson.

“Fans love bobbleheads and they get other promotions—jerseys and that stuff like that,” Cohen said. “So we’re just trying to create a new category of promotional items that are collectibles that fans could enjoy, and we just thought it was a cool idea and gave it a shot.”

And at one point Mesler, donning the jersey with his name and the number 44, which he wore in high school, gestured at something beyond artist-made trinkets. He was standing by a VIP entrance to Citi Field and started pointing out toward the parking lots, vast swaths of land that, if Cohen’s ambitions ever somehow bypass a legislative blockade, could become part of a casino complex. The vision? Take sculptures from Cohen’s art collection out of storage and install them around the stadium, creating a museum experience between parking the Subaru and buying some peanuts and Cracker Jacks. There’ll be a Koons and a Hirst and a Jean Dubuffet. Maybe not the Giacometti piece, which became the most expensive sculpture ever sold, but certainly complex installations by Mesler and Johnson.

“We’ll have Steve’s holdings, and we can have people come to the ballpark two hours early, and we’re gonna see Johnson Park, Dubuffet Way, Mesler Park,” Mesler said. “We’ll have docents and maps, and Steve can show everyone around.”

When I asked Cohen about the idea of expanding on the arts initiatives at the ballpark, he paused and gave a diplomatic answer.

“Listen, people go to museums,” he said. “I mean, we have a big stadium. And I mean, you could imagine, at some point, perhaps some bigger pieces of art around the outside, sculpture around the outside of the stadium. And so that’s TBD; we’ll figure that out. And so this is a relatively contained attempt to introduce art to our audience, and in a fun way—something that people can collect and enjoy. And we’ll see where it goes. I mean, we’ll evaluate it.”

Then there’s the matter of whether all this art stuff will help make the Mets any better. A few minutes after Cohen and I hopped off the phone, he was compelled to fire up the X app and engage with his very vocal follower base of Mets fans and hedgie ’shippers.

“Looking forward to our 10 game homestand starting tonight. LGM,” Cohen wrote on his X page. “We are experimenting with our new artist series giveaway tomorrow Enjoy the Joel Mesler created totebag . Feedback appreciated.”

The feedback came in quickly.

From a user and self-described “die-hard New York Mets fan”: “Are you kidding me? You’re more concerned about feedback on a giveaway, than you are about the terrible on-field product? Unbelievable!”

(“That’s funny . I get plenty of that,” Cohen replied.)

From a user and self-described “Mets fan unfortunately”: “Steve are you also asking for feedback regarding the team?”

(“I get plenty of that,” Cohen said.)

From a user and self-described “disgruntled fan who shoots from the hip”: “Steve you had to know what kind of feedback you were gonna get here lol.”

(“Yes , I knew for sure,” Cohen said.)

On the phone, Cohen said that, through the artist giveaways, he really wants to enhance the Mets experience, with the hope of unleashing good juju that will get fans in seats, keep the Mets fandom happy, and maybe even propel the team to victory.

“Whenever you introduce a new category such as this, people kind of don’t know what it is,” he told me. “And so a lot of times, the first iteration, you hope it gets viral, and you do a second, third one—it becomes a real category. And so that would be my hope. And make it fun. We’re trying to make, any way we can, a day at the ballpark fun, and this is an example of that. I’d like to get on a winning streak—that’d be fun.”

And so as Mesler walked up to the plate, with the lineups for both teams cooling their heels in the dugouts, he briefly glanced back at the jumbotron making his face look the size of a five-story building. He thought better of that, however, and his head snapped back toward the catcher as he reached the dirt of the mound.

“Joel, it’s your pitch,” the PA voice bellowed through the stadium.

And then, in his first throw since high school, Mesler throttled it right down the middle: low and, contra Cohen, directly over the plate. The Mets had a no-hitter through five innings and held a 2-1 lead going into the ninth. The Giants tied it, pulling ahead in extra innings. New York lost 7-2, but half the crowd went home with a sweet tote—111 baseball games to go this season.

And that’s a wrap on this edition of True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Have a tip? Drop me a line at [email protected].