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.