New York Mets: The Wilpons will cede control to a buyer after all

Maybe the Wilpons learned something when Steve Cohen backed out rather than let them keep running the New York Mets another 5-years? Big maybe?

First, Steve Cohen, who has an 8% stake in the New York Mets going in, was going to buy the team with enough to give him 80%. That was the early-December word. Until he wasn’t.

It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas for Wilpons-weary Mets fans would become the Christmas that really wasn’t. Until it didn’t.

Now the word out of New York is that the Wilpons are not just looking for a new buyer but are willing to do what they were reluctant to do when Cohen was the buyer-to-be. They’re willing to cede control of the team when the sale is a done deal, not insist—as proved the Cohen deal-breaker—upon being retained, essentially, as the grand high exhausted mystic roosters for five years to follow the sale.

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Had the Cohen deal not collapsed, the billionaire hedge-fund impresario would have paid a record $2.6 billion to buy the Mets. A sports consultant named Marc Ganis tells Bloomberg News the Wilpons stand to reap bigger now that they’ve decided they’re okay with handing control of the team over immediately.

In most cases an immediate sale with control will lead to a higher price than a sale today with a future option of control. Most parties who buy a team want to own and operate it sooner rather than later. They don’t want to be in a position where the interim owner may reduce the value, take on debt or make bad trades.

I don’t know what Ganis knows of the Mets’ history since the mid-1990s. The incumbent owners should only consider themselves fortunate that a lot of their shenanigans didn’t turn the Mets into a bargain-town property.

Forbes writer Mike Ozanian amplified the point when Cohen’s original interest surfaced: “Why would anybody buying a majority stake in a dysfunctional business allow the folks who ran it dysfunctionally for years keep running it? Time is of the essence.”

Dysfunctional business? Run dysfunctionally? The Mad Hatter made more sense with less meddling than the Wilpons seem to have made for about a quarter-century. The Hatter would tell you, “Come have some tea, we have no tea.” The Wilpons too often seemed to tell you, “Come have some tea—oops! We’ve only got seltzer,” before squirting you in the face with it. Consider:

* When Nelson Doubleday was still the Mets’ co-owner, he wanted to bring Hall of Famer Mike Piazza to the Mets in the worst way possible in 1998. Fred Wilpon actually tried to thwart the deal. That’s still a 2000 National League pennant displayed proudly in Shea Stadium and then Citi Field, and that’s a Mets cap reposing atop Piazza’s head on his Hall of Fame plaque now. Way to call ’em.

* For every deal that brought aboard such better-than-useful Mets as Carlos Delgado, Carlos Beltran, and (before the injuries really torpedoed him) Johan Santana, there were deals such as Bobby Bonilla‘s second tour with the Mets. The one for which the Mets will continue paying Bonilla $1 million a year through 2035.

* There was also the Victor Zambrano fiasco. The 2004 fiasco in which the Mets sent then-prize pitching prospect Scott Kazmir to the Tampa Bay Rays in exchange for the veteran whose injury troubles the Mets ignored, only to watch Zambrano limited to three games during their push toward the postseason and Kazmir become a three-time All Star and a key on the Rays’ 2008 World Series entrant.

* In absolute fairness, the Wilpons actually thought that investing in what proved Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme would return them enough to make things like that botched Bonilla deal an easier swallow. Getting out from under that disaster compelled the Wilpons to tighten their fists. But they weren’t exactly virtuoso baseball operators no matter how crunched their financials were or weren’t.

* Wilpon and his son, Jeff, have a sport-wide reputation for blocking trades and signings their baseball brain trusts recommended powerfully enough while signing off on deals and signings described most charitably as dubious.

* Not to mention letting the wrong men walk, as they did with second baseman Daniel Murphy after the 2015 World Series. Murphy’s glove may have proven a major weakness for those Mets in that Series, but he swung a big bat in that postseason, including that staggering six-game postseason home run streak and his winning the National League Championship Series Most Valuable Player award.

Big deal, the Wilpons virtually shrugged. Bigger deal, their division-rival Washington Nationals said, handing Murphy a three-year, $37.5 million deal during which Murphy made two All-Star teams, led the National League in doubles back-to-back seasons, led the league in slugging and on-base percentage in year one as a Nat, and helped the Nats win back-to-back National League Easts.

Essentially, the Mets shrugged themselves out of three useful-and-more seasons and out of a solid veteran who’d have held the stronger fort until their younger infield comers proved Show-ready.

* Remember when George Steinbrenner was known all late-1970s/all-1980s long as the man who threw out the first manager of the year, or close enough to it? No such Steinbrenner firing was executed as despicably as the Mets executed Willie Randolph, his pitching coach Rick Peterson, and his first base coach Tom Nieto in 2008.

It happened after the Mets traveled coast-to-coast to Anaheim to start an interleague series against the Los Angeles Angels. And, after the Mets opened the set with a 9-6 win. And, after midnight, at approximately 3:11 a.m, by which time the baseball press back east had already filed their stories, and Met fans who weren’t working nights or who happened to be nocturnal by nature were sound asleep after the game ended. Even a manager who’s earned his pink slip deserves to be treated better than that.

Charity advises that the Wilpons might have learned a lesson or two about the control issue when the Cohen deal collapsed. Sentiment says it was a shame the deal collapsed considering that Cohen, like yours truly, is a Met fan since the day they were born. Cynicism might tell you that maybe the Wilpons, still untangling themselves from the Madoff mess, might have been edgy about handing most of the store over to a fellow whose signature hedge fund got caught with its hands in the wrong cookie jars, even if Cohen himself wasn’t accused of wrongdoing.

The question now becomes who will buy the Mets, for how much, and will the buyer have at least Cohen’s gravitas as a fan who just so happened to become a self-made billionaire and decided it was time to do something for the Mets other than root for them and own a tiny stake in them. One thing remains true, though. The Mets have been many things in their 58-year history. Boring still isn’t one of them.