‘Sell the Team!’ Please, for the Sake of Mets and Knicks Fans

The Wilpons call to mind that family down the street that talks of selling the old house even as they insist any new owner must let their son retain the master bedroom.

Baseball’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, rallied to the Wilpons’ side Thursday with the alacrity of an old family retainer. “The assertion that the transaction fell apart because of something that the Wilpons did is completely and utterly unfair,” he insisted to reporters.

Manfred has a history here as he helped his predecessor, Bud Selig, engineer the Major League Baseball loans that kept the Wilpons afloat after it emerged that their longtime financial adviser, Bernie Madoff, had filched everything but the family silver. Manfred and Selig waved off any whiff of criticism as the Wilpons cut costs and baseball budgets as if the Mets were a small market team by Flushing Bay.

The worst of those penurious days have perhaps passed. The Mets remain in the spending exurbs compared with the Yankees and the Dodgers but the team’s payroll ranks eighth overall. Poor management, however, remains a clear and present danger.

So the Mets this off-season let a good pitcher, Zack Wheeler, walk in free agency to a top competitor, Philadelphia, and signed a once splendid reliever, Dellin Betances, who is 31 and last year appeared to have begun to break down with shoulder and Achilles injuries. In November they hired a new manager, Carlos Beltran. In January, Beltran was ousted because of his role in the sign-stealing scandal in Houston.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/sports/mets-wilpon-dolan-knicks.html?emc=rss&partner=rss