Is it bad that a couple of my favorite moments of the Mets 2014 season had absolutely nothing to do with the play on the field?
The first one happened in May when a report came out that co-owner Saul Katz wanted out and was looking to sell his share of the team. I remember thinking at the time, “Oh my God, was this the beginning of the end of the Wilpons’ stranglehold on the franchise?” Unfortunately my hopes were dashed and my jubilation short-lived when the report turned out to be false.
Another ray of sunshine came when ousted vice president Leigh Castergine filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against Jeff Wilpon and Sterling Mets. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed on that one.
The thing that sucks as far as the Wilpons go is that there are way too many powerful people who are very eager and all too willing to keep them entrenched as Mets owners.
How can we win when you have a baseball commissioner turning a blind eye to all their wrongdoings, and a former NYC Mayor who essentially gave the Wilpons $4 billion dollars worth of real estate for free? Real estate, mind you, that will be worth $15 billion after the Willets Point Development is completed?
Still, the fact that the Mets are cursed with an inept, ill-equipped, and disconnected ownership is not just limited to a long-suffering fan base, the rest of the country has caught up to just how awful the Wilpons are. Rolling Stone magazine recently listed the Wilpons among their 15 Worst Owners in Sports.
The Wilpons are the only baseball ownership group to share a factoid with the nation of Albania, in that they were both nearly ruined by a Ponzi scheme. Twice.
The Wilpons repeatedly structured deferred payments into player contracts and handed over the funds to fraudster and family friend Bernie Madoff to invest in the meantime, making money before the bills came due. Whoops. They also built the cavernous Citi Field at the tail end of a high-offense era, then were surprised to find that fans were pissed they didn’t get to see any dingers. At the same time, Fred Wilpon is so enamored of old Ebbets Field – he played with Sandy Koufax in high school – that he designed Citi Field to celebrate Ebbets and was further surprised when Mets fans suggested he should think of having any Mets memorabilia there instead.
Thanks to wise investment, the Wilpons have lived on a shoestring budget for six years, taking profits from their ownership in SNY to make up team shortfalls and hoping that a tight budget and crossed fingers can arrest the team cratering that began in 2009. The Wilpons have seemingly never met a problem for which an absence of a solution will do, unless they have a solution worse than the problem, and that solution is invariably “them.” As a distraction, they’ve repeatedly used the Daily News as their mouthpiece to trash players and deflect attention from complaints. The limits of that strategy were exposed when a former team executive sued Jeff Wilpon for allegedly firing her for having a baby out of wedlock.
Honestly, I was shocked the Wilpons weren’t ranked worse than 14th. When you consider the totality of their incompetence and the market the play in, I would say they belong among the top five worst owners. Rolling Stone was being far too kind.
