Home Teams with Howard Megdal, September 15, 2020
Why Wilpons leaving matters so much for Mets — Must-click New York sports links
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Why Wilpons leaving matters so much for Mets
A question I get quite often these days, as someone who has written about Mets ownership for about a decade, is: will Steve Cohen be an upgrade?
There’s plenty unknown about how the newly-signed owner of the New York Mets, pending the agreement of MLB, will operate the club. But the short answer is: there’s almost no way he can be any worse. And there’s ample reason for optimism he can be much, much better.
Baseball team owners can help or hurt in three primary ways. They can spend money, or not. They can hire effective baseball ops people and empower them, or they can interfere in non-expert ways. And they can avoid crippling non-baseball actions that affect their ability to steer the ship of the team, or they can steer headlong into them.
Will Cohen spend commensurate to the size of the New York market, if not his own wallet, which will be the fullest in MLB? We don’t know. But we do know the Wilpons have spent many hundreds of millions below that level, year after year, in ways that put the team at a competitive disadvantage. This is the rough process, year after year: team comes after debt load brought on by the disappearance of what they thought were their Bernie Madoff holdings.
Will Cohen hire intelligent baseball ops people and get out of the way? Also unclear. But we know the Wilpons didn’t do that, again and again and again and again. There are so many more agains I could add, but you get the point. There’s unlikely to be both more interference AND the decision-making, should there be ownership interference, is unlikely to be this flawed.
Will Cohen avoid problems in the non-baseball realm that lead to a compromised ownership group? Again, we know he has a past with baggage. But the Wilpons were victimized by not one, but two Ponzi schemes. Seriously, they fell victim to one, and still threw in with Bernie Madoff. Jeff Wilpon also managed to harass a pregnant woman, she said, at large group Mets executive meetings. There’s little reason to think the Wilpons ever learned from anything they’ve ever done, making the next eruption a matter of when, not if. Did Cohen? We’ll find out.
In point of fact, what’s saved the Wilpons from financial ruin is the exploding values of both baseball team and sports network (SNY) that allowed them to continue sucking them both dry over the past decade to help weather the financial storm brought on by Bernie Madoff back in 2008. The result has been 12 years, or nearly 20 percent of the entirety of New York Mets history, with the team an afterthought to the financial survival of its owners.
There are no guarantees in life, as 2020 has taught us again and again. But there is more than merely hope, or Tug McGraw’s exaltation that “Ya gotta believe”, to think that the sale of the Mets to Steve Cohen means there are better days ahead.
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The Day Ahead
Mets-Phillies starts at Citizens Bank Park, New York at the fringes of the playoff race and in need of some wins. The Yankees host the Blue Jays, with Garcia on the mound.