Mike Lupica: Steve Cohen is the big man in town with Juan Soto signing and is the owner everybody wants

There was a time, way back when George Steinbrenner blew into town on so much brio and hot air, that he became the owner in sports, and not just here, that everybody wanted. Now it’s Steve Cohen. And not just here.

That doesn’t mean he just bought the Mets even won World Series by signing Juan Soto away from the Yankees. If you still think all it takes is money to buy happiness in sports, then take a look back at the days when the Yankees were money-whipping the baseball world, and how many World Series it brought them. Now sometimes money does buy happiness, and all you have to do is ask Dodgers fans about that. But not nearly as often as you think.

They’ve got deep pockets out there with the Guggenheim Baseball Management, who paid out a billion to Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto last winter. Just not as deep as Cohen’s, who’s got more money than any other owner in professional sports and just showed you, in lights and as loud as the big city, that he’s not afraid to spend it to get what he wants.

Hal Steinbrenner wasn’t afraid to make a bigger offer for Soto than anybody — including Hal himself — thought he would ever make, an offer more than twice what he paid Aaron Judge. This Steinbrenner just got beat. No shame, and look it up: There’s still a reason why they keep score in sports.

And it’s worth reminding everybody all over again that this is Cohen’s money. He didn’t come into the world as someone who, as the great-grandson of Robert Wood Johnson I, would eventually become one of the heirs to Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune the way Our Woody did. He wasn’t the son of Charles Dolan and son of Cablevision the way Jimmy Dolan is. Or inherit co-ownership of the Giants the way John Mara and Steve Tisch long since have.

You may not like the way Cohen came by his money, or that he once had to pay a fine of $1.8 billion because of insider trading. It’s still his, and he’s been spending it since he gave out his first big contract to Francisco Lindor, who became one of the most valuable players in the entire sport this past season, and did the most to carry the Mets all the way to the NLCS, and a tougher series against the Dodgers than the Yankees played in the World Series. Cohen wasn’t afraid to spend on Lindor, or Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander and he wasn’t afraid to cut his losses on Scherzer and Verlander in his own brand of a market correction. And now he isn’t afraid to hand out the biggest contract in the history of American team sports for Juan Soto.

From all published reports, Cohen thought almost until the end that he was going to lose Soto to the Yankees. Then he didn’t. He paid the most money and made all the right moves and now he wins Soto and the Yankees lose him and, yeah, because they still do keep score in sports, that’s what the scoreboard now says in New York, for everybody to see.

You are allowed to think it’s silly that the suite at Citi Field that Cohen threw in might have been one of the determining factors at the end, after the Yankees made it clear that they don’t do business with baseball players that way; think it silly just because of the money Cohen was already throwing in Soto’s direction. But what that showed is that Cohen, the hedge fund guy, might not have been hedging his bet on Soto, but sure was sweetening it.