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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.

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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.

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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.

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Are the Mets effectively a small market team now?

I know nothing about finances or lawsuits or running a major league team, but as my old boss taught me, “Perception is reality.”

I find myself wondering if the Mets have just virtually moved to a smaller market.

When you have a billion with a B dollars hanging over your head, don’t you run a tight ship for a while?

When you are seeking investors how can you give a shortstop “Carl Crawford money.”. Wouldn’t it be wiser to ride it out with an inexpensive solution, perhaps named Tejada?

Would you spend money on. An Old Timers Day so some fat guy in the uppers can cheer for Tom Seaver? Who would pay for Tom’s airfare?

Are you going out and picking up a big contract to get you over the hump on August 1 or do you just hope for the best?

Say the season is rolling along. You gonna let K-Rod get enough appearances to trigger the contract, or is someone going to whisper to Colactus to lay off the “easy saves” when up by more than a run?

I was ready for 2011 to be a year where I don’t stress and just enjoy the baseball for baseball sake. Now I find myself wondering if I should worry about the next 5 years.

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Thanks to Media Goon for keeping it together these past few days.

I’m all about the Steelers today. I was a Jets fan, then when they left me (Shea) i left them. The they tortured us with 10 years of awful (bleep)blocking football on NBC. The redt of the country would get good games and doubleheaders and we’d get Jets-Chargers crap. This pre-Internet and way before scores up in the corner. Then when halftime came stupid channel 4 would give us news instead of the halftime show. All that adds up to hating the Jets and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Pitt beat the dumb Jets, go Pitt.