Mack - Steve Kettman

Morning.

My thoughts on both the Steve Kettman book about Sandy Alderson, but also the Howard Medgal interpretation of it.

All this comes at a time when a certain amount of both the writers and fan base can’t seem to move on to the future. I consider the billboard just outside of St. Lucie on I95 an insult to the players that had to travel from their home and drive by it.

Let me say one more time before I go on with this… I am not a fan of the Wilpon family owning this team. I thought, and still think, that baseball should have come up with a way to step in and influence a sale for a figure that would have bailed out the people that lost all their money (including the Wilpons) in this fiasco.

That being said, businessmen (and women) invest in the growth of their companies with both cash and debt. That’s how you do it and it’s not much different from how you finance your house. You go to a lending institute with a value analysis of the ‘property’ you want to purchase, a plan that projects how you are going to turn this purchase into a profit (for both you and the bank) and a declaration of how much cash you are going to ‘put down’ on the purchase.

Everything was hunky-dory until Madoff blew up. The team was competitive, profitable, and the salaries paid were online with their ‘big-market’ status. Then, everything went to hell in a New York minute.

Do you honestly believe that the Wilpons did this purposely to themselves?

I don’t even believe that the Wilpons knew the financial end result of all this when it happened, especially since future profit would be tied directly to the fan base coming out and buying tickets for future games.

And it seems to me that it would take a moron to accept the General Manager job and not recognize that there was going to be some financial restraints in the immediate future.

No, this was a mess the day Alderson took over and all the Wilpons could do was give him an estimate of the salaries he could pay for the next upcoming season. It was Alderson’s job to clear contracts, make new deals, sign international guppies, and draft the best player available. Hopefully, the profit and loss sheets at the end of each season would reflect additional revenue from tickets sales. They didn’t, so the Wilpons had to continue to restrict Alderson budget wise.

And by the way… if the Wilpons decided to dig in their own pocket and double the salaries at this point, the government and/or bank regulators would have probably stepped in and prevented this from happening.

No, Kettman and (especially) Medgal are stuck on an old record on a barely usage turntable.

I believe Alderson has straightened the ship and, after five years, has it going in the right direction, though he easily could have been more successful at this point. The waters, at times, have been choppy, but they are getting better. Even the salaries are up close to 25% from a year ago.

The Mets, the writers, and the fans have to move on from all this crap and start worrying about who’s coming out of the pen as a lefty rather than concentrating on how Alderson is reacting to the Wilpon’s hands on the purse strings.