Photo: Wall Street Journal
This fan base has been through so, so, so much. It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you root for this team, you’ve experienced heartache first-hand as a direct result of it. Well, friends, the New York Mets have gone and done it again. Or so it would seem.
According to sources via the New York Post, billionaire hedge-fund manager Steve Cohen is close to pulling out of the deal that would have netted him 80 percent of the blah, blah, blah. I can’t even type it.
Per the report, Cohen is “deeply unhappy with the Wilpons changing the terms of the [$2.6 billion] deal at a very late stage and has decided to walk away”. Of course, they did. Or maybe they didn’t. Honestly, who knows at this point.
What we do know is that this is [checks notes] not good. How can a professional sports franchise manage to bungle nearly every situation they encounter, including two fairly huge slip-ups this offseason alone? That’s a question for the ages.
If the Cohen sale is indeed off the table, the Wilpons will have let two ridiculously lucrative sales slip through their fingers because of… wait for it… their incessant meddling since 2011. It makes you wonder how they ever got this far in the first place.
This sale was supposed to begin a shiny, brand-new chapter for this organization and turn the page on a decade-plus of making just enough effort to win but never close to enough. Now it’s in apparent turmoil.
Keep in mind, Steve Cohen could very well be using this public forum as a negotiating tool. Turning a disenfranchised fan base against an ownership group that’s already despised is not hard to do and could be extremely effective as this saga trudges on.
Now, all the pressure is on the Wilpons to get this deal done. And, if you’ve been paying attention to this ownership group over the past decade or so, it’s very tough to imagine them not doing all they can to make this $2.6 billion deal work out.
Let’s hope for the best. What else can we do?
