How MLB’s Most Confounding Team Is (Mostly) Overcoming Decades of Dysfunction

Are attitude and personnel and money enough for this wayward organization to become a normal winning team?

One of heptadecabillionaire Steve Cohen’s first acts as owner of the Mets was to give almost everyone a raise. This was not actually his idea. Team president Sandy Alderson had spent nearly eight years as the club’s GM before stepping back to deal with a recurrence of an unspecified form of cancer, and when Cohen brought him back in 2020 and promoted him, one of the first items on Alderson’s to-do list was a dollar sign.

Alderson had initially joined the Mets in 2010 as a suggestion by the commissioner’s office to lend stability to a franchise reeling from the collapse of Bernie Madoff’s…