Introducing Mets Police Tickets

Good morning Mets fans, Shannon here to tell you about our new friends at TiqIq.  As you know, The Mets Police always encourage you to support the Mets financially (Madoff jokes aside) and I hope you’ll attend lots of games this season.

Should you choose to partake in the secondary ticket market, as many of us did in 2010, I invite you to try Mets Police Tickets which is part of a partnership with TiqIq.

On the main page of the site you’ll see a widget will have regularly updated graphics and information.  The widget clicks through to a cool looking page that’s all about tickets.

TiqIq will also be hooking me up with various ticket related stories and graphics…for example:

As you poke around the page you’ll be able to easily tweak the data to break it out by individual sections (if you’re like me you may like searching the Promenade.)

Why did we partner with these TiqIq folks?

1. Aggregated Listings: They aggregate all major sellers in the market so you can find the best deal.

2. TiqZone Categorization: They break each venue up into TiqZones, which are groupings of sections that they’ve determined are comparable in value.

3. TiqIQ Statistics: They provide ticket-level buying intelligence through their IQ rating and TiqIQ Statistics.

4. E-Ticket Filter: Want tickets last minute?  You can find all the available e-tickets so you can print your tickets from home or the office.

5. All-in Pricing Option: Before you complete your sale you’ll be able to tell exactly how much your tickets will cost including all service and shipping fees.

And remember Mets fans, always support the Mets – with your extra savings why not attend even more games, buy an extra hot dog, or encourage non-black attire by buying lots of blue caps and any type of blackless jersey?

Yes, I get a commission on any ticket purchase you make through the page.  As previously discussed, I am a capitalist.  I’ll probably just buy a Lee Mazzilli jersey with the proceeds anyway.

How I Met The Mets: Final Game At Shea

For your post Super Bowl enjoyment…

This is a “proof of concept” video series I have been making to encourage SNY to develop this into some quality rain delay filler. Imagine it with Howie Rose doing the voice, and some access to players and footage, real editing equipment, real editors etc.  This version is a fat guy, the internet and an iphone app that makes videos look “old.”

Next week: The Subway Series.

If you’re a superfan and you are wondering what happened to Episode 3 – I decided I can do better than what I was going to release, so I am going to re-edit it.  So this is episode 4, then “2000” is episode 5.

Please share, like, tweet, embed on your site, write the President, mention it to Saul Katz and Mark Cuban – whatever gets this thing produced.  Unless of course you actually enjoy Beer Money.

If for some reason the video isn’t part of this post (we have a site-bug and I went to bed as soon as the game ended) you can watch it on youtube here.

Forbes: Death of the Mets

Forbes sure came out swinging.  I think this is how most fans feel, however I maintain none of us (you, me, other bloggers, reporters) really know what’s going on.

Wilpon and Katz are done. Finished. The two will soon be out of baseball entirely.

The Mets franchise as we have known it since Nelson Doubleday and Wilpon bought the team in 1986, is dead. There are two causes of this fatality: One, Wilpon forgot his primary duty as a team owner was to produce a quality product that, in baseball’s biggest market, was self-sustaining. He had that obligation. Instead, he used the team as an ATM to earn high returns from a dubious fund manager and his cable channel to pay himself a leveraged dividend.

More via Forbes

Also (Goon may have covered this the other day but it didn’t register in my brain) in another article Forbes says the Mets need to make $30 million in 2011 in order just to make debt payments. And I think I read they lost money last year.  Very confusing but it’s like a train wreck, you have to look.

After the Super Bowl sing by for a special How I Met The Mets.  This one takes place in 2008 and is better and longer than the first two.  It’s How I Met The Mets: Last Game at Shea.

Lawsuit Points Spotlight on Saul Katz

More stuff keeps coming out about the Mets owners. This time the spotlight is on Saul Katz.

Fred Wilpon, Katz’s brother-in-law and the principal owner of the team, was its public face. Katz was supposed to be the brains behind the real estate and investment businesses that had first made ownership of the Mets possible. One former executive with the Mets nicknamed him Rain Man for his business brilliance.

Interesting that they called hime Rain Man. When I think of that movie, I think of Dustin Hoffman saying he’s a great driver and recalling phone numbers out of a phone book from memory.

As chief strategist at Sterling, Katz was also primarily responsible for Sterling’s investments, including those in real estate, in private equity and, until Dec. 11, 2008, in Madoff’s firm, the trustee says. Katz, it appears from the lawsuit, was also Sterling’s point of contact with Madoff. The men talked regularly, the suit says, and during certain periods they did so on a daily basis. Madoff’s former secretary said Katz was a much more frequent visitor to Madoff’s offices than Wilpon. With few exceptions, the suit asserts, when Katz called Madoff’s firm, “he did not speak to anyone other than Madoff.”

To me that sounds like Katz had a lot more of the dealings with Madoff then the Wilpons.

But the lawsuit says Katz never performed any kind of meaningful due diligence on Madoff’s firm. “Although Saul Katz was well aware of the risks associated with” Madoff’s operation, the suit says, “he never once attempted to confirm through any third party that Madoff actually traded the securities identified on his or other Sterling-related monthly account statements.”

Katz failed to do that, the suit says, even though he “confessed to his friends that he could not figure out how Madoff generated such smooth positive returns.”

Personally if it was my investments I would be trying to see how I was making the money. If Katz was a financial whiz why didn’t he check this out more?

Read the whole story from the NY TIMES HERE.