Paying $22 an hour for skilled analytical work in New York City is exploitative. It gets worse when the person signing the checks is as rich as Steve Cohen, and the Mets made the case themselves.
In a recent batch of job postings, the Mets advertised an Intern, Data Science role at $20 to $25 an hour and an Associate Analyst, Baseball Analytics role at $22 to $25 an hour. Run the top end across a normal 2,080-hour work year and you land around $45,000 to $52,000. That's in New York, for a job that requires real quantitative skill, with a stack of applicants who'd crawl over glass to get it.
The same posting makes it indefensible. In it, the Mets also advertised a Data Scientist role at $80,000 to $100,000 and a Senior Data Scientist role at $120,000 to $150,000. The organization knows exactly what this skill set is worth, because it priced the senior version two rooms down the hall. The entry-level number is a floor the Mets chose to set because they can.
They can set it because the line out the door never stops. People love baseball, they want in, and every team in the sport has figured out that passion works like a discount code. League-wide, entry-level baseball-operations jobs cluster in roughly the same low range, with the middle of the pack around $43,000 to $51,000. The problem isn't unique to the Mets, but the Mets are owned by a hedge-fund billionaire who has repeatedly spent toward the top of the league on players. Cohen will outbid anybody for a bat. He'll annualize an analyst at $22 an hour.
The defense you'll hear is that the base number isn't the whole picture, that there's housing help or meal money, and that lowball offers are just what happens when a thousand people want fifty jobs. Stipends don't turn $45,000 into a living wage in Manhattan, and "the market lets us" is a confession. A market where only candidates with family money can afford the entry rung works like a gate, filtering the sport's future decision-makers down to the kids whose parents can cover rent while they "get their foot in."
That cost lands on the Mets eventually. Smart analytical people have options. The ones who'd rather build models for a baseball team than for a bank are exactly who a franchise should fight to keep, and instead the sport prices them out and ships them to Wall Street and tech, where the same brain pays triple. An analytics-forward operation can't treat its analytics pipeline like unpaid labor with a logo on it.
Cohen doesn't need a lecture on compensation. He understands leverage better than almost anyone alive. He knows what these people are worth and that they'll take less, and he's decided to let them. The money to fix this is a rounding error on a single veteran reliever. Pay the kids doing the math.
