The cold, unappetizing truth for Steve Cohen is that he has only one person to blame for the backlash presently aimed at his baseball team, and it isn’t David Stearns. Oh, Stearns makes for an easy target, a never-played-the-game Harvard man who is the perfect contrast to the rub-some-dirt-on-it tobacco chompers who ruled the game for a century.

But Cohen didn’t inherit Stearns. He hired Stearns. He didn’t just hire Stearns, he waited for Stearns, waited for his contract with the Brewers to expire for a year after he stopped actually working for the Brewers. So Mets fans who are inclined to give Cohen a pass and aim all their venom at Stearns are like people who blame a child for misbehaving at a restaurant, rather than the parent who enables them.

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Except as this ice-cold hot stove season drags ever onward for the Mets, a lot of the fans have begun to realize that slandering the GM and his yet-to-be-revealed plans for the 2026 Mets is a misdirected use of their various furies.

A lot of those fans remember the way Cohen came barging into the picture in his first hours on the job five years and one month ago, declaring: “One team wins the World Series every year, so that’s a pretty high bar. But if I don’t win a World Series in the next three to five years — I would like to make it sooner — then obviously I would consider that slightly disappointing.”