Steve Cohen

What could Mets owner Steve Cohen be thinking right now, watching one of the most expensive rosters in baseball flounder as one of the worst teams in the sport?

That question came up on an episode of “The Michael Kay Show” on Friday, sparked by Cohen’s previous statements, when he publicly stated he expected a World Series championship within five years of buying the team. That window has come and gone.

Last year, after signing Juan Soto to a blockbuster deal — swiping him away from the cross-town rival New York Yankees — the Mets didn’t even make the playoffs.

Now they’re sitting near the bottom of the league.

“He’s got to be outraged. I mean the amount of money that he’s spending, the amount of money that he’s losing. I mean, rest assured it’s a New York team but the payroll that he has compared to the revenue that he takes in... He’s losing, I’d say, about $300 million a year,” Kay said, via YouTube.

Kay points out that Cohen doesn’t own SNY, the regional sports network that airs Mets games. The Wilpon family retained that asset.

So Cohen is paying an enormous payroll, losing games, and collecting a rights fee rather than the full revenue stream a network ownership stake would provide.

This is a man who, as Kay pointed out, “fires traders if they have a bad month. He is a barracuda when it comes to the financial world.”

The difference, of course, is that people don’t pack stadiums to watch potential Wall Street losses and gains. Those things happen mostly in the shadows.

Baseball losses happen on the back page of every tabloid in New York City, day after day.

Kay also pushed back on the idea that manager Carlos Mendoza deserves blame. Mendoza was at the helm when the Mets went to Game 6 of the NLCS against the Dodgers two years ago.

The roster injuries and offensive struggles aren’t on him. If anything, Kay suggested, the constant coaching staff turnover under Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns may be part of the problem.

So Cohen is stuck in a particularly frustrating spot with the team he envisioned as the East Coast Dodgers looking more like, in Kay’s words, “the East Coast Angels.”

For anyone who wants a vivid picture of what Cohen might be experiencing internally, Kay offered a cultural reference: the Showtime series “Billions,” whose protagonist Bobby Axelrod is widely believed to be based on Cohen.

The show captures a certain breed of ultra-competitive, win-at-all-costs financial titan who views every loss — no matter how small — as intolerable.

“If Steve Cohen is 30% of what Bobby Axelrod is, he’s going nuts,” Kay said. “He doesn’t like to lose.”