As you may have heard or read on this site a couple of days ago, the Mets received a $40 million dollar bridge loan to help them buy time until the sales of those $20 million dollars stakes to individual investors start materializing.

It was Bank of America who kicked in the dough, and it needed approval from Bud Selig which he undoubtedly gave.

I’m really getting tired of Uncle Bud’s continued efforts to keep this hopeless sinking ship we call the Mets afloat. If this were any other team, MLB would have already stepped in and asumed control as they have so many other times before in the last two decades alone.

The New York Mets franchise is on life support my friends – we’re running on fumes. The Wilpon’s are either too proud or too stupid to let go of a franchise they can no longer afford to keep. The longer they hang on, the more tenuous and the more dire the circumstances become.

The Mets need a new owner with a desire to win and pockets that are deep enough to save this franchise from what it has become; a small market team playing in the number one sports mecca in the world. Even many of the fans have embraced this concept which is sad in and of itself.

We deserve an owner whose passion for New York style baseball is surpassed only by a competitive spirit and a thirst for a championship – and not one that is five or more years in the making. We deserve an owner who can hire the right people to do the right job in this – the largest and most passionate baseball market of them all.

Everything you have seen since the construction of Citi Field which was built on the backbone of fictitious profits and ill-gotten gains, has been all smoke and mirrors.

From the hiring of Sandy Alderson which was the result of a quasi-takeover by Selig as a condition of the first $25 million dollar loan, to the ongoing efforts to weaken the product on the field under the guise of some miraculous transformation in 2014, has been nothing short of a pretense and a flimsy one at that.

All these ruses combined with everything else are all intended to serve one purpose alone, and that is to keep the Wilpons in charge and in the driver’s seat – a seat they should have abandoned long ago.

This $40 million dollar bridge loan that Selig approved for the Wilpons’ only delays their eventual exodus, and invites even more heartache for a fan base that has suffered for far too long and deserves so much better. We have been a patient fanbase, but our only reward has been to see a once proud franchise fall into the depths of a new philosophy that is intended for the likes of baseball’s poorest and smallest markets.

To me, that is a suffocating realization of just how far we have fallen. They say a picture is worth a thousand words…

(click to enlarge)

This is where the New York Mets are right now as a franchise… Under our current ownership the future is bleak and tumultuous at best. And to those of you who think a new GM has changed our direction and set us on path to championship caliber baseball in 2014, I have a bridge I want to sell you.

This unaltered political cartoon originally appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in November of 2006.