Mack – Attention Mets Twitter

A few stories crossed my news feed this past week.

1.     The New York Mets have announced that they have renewed the contract of their 70-year old General Manager, Sandy Alderson.

In typical Mets/Sandy Speak fashion, the release on Alderson lacked what he will be paid and the length of the extension.

The second story was even more interesting:

2.     Belmont Park, the old home for the Belmont Racetrack, will be developed into a new home for the New York Islanders hockey team.

The new home for the Islanders will be developed by the Oak View Group and Sterling Project Development, a real estate form owned by Sterling Equities.

As stated on their own web site –

Sterling Equities is a diversified, family-run group of companies guided by the values of partnership and civic responsibility. Its portfolio is focused on holdings in real estate, sports, and media in the New York area.

Key officers of Sterling Equities are Fred Wilpon (Chairman, Co-Founder, Senior Partner), Saul Katz (President, Co-Founder, Senior Partner) and Jeff Wilpon (Partner).

Do the names look familiar?

Let’s remember a few things.

a.     The Mets did not hire Sandy Alderson in 2010. Alderson was pushed on the Mets by then Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig after the Mets almost went belly up from the Bernie Madoff fiasco. His job was to get the payroll of the Mets back in line so the team can eventually show a profit down the road.

b.     The Mets had to borrow $65mil from the MLB in 2011 to keep unions happy (interest payments for building the new stadium) and the team on the field (the money was repaid in 2012 when the Wilpons and Katz sold minority interests in the team).

c.      In 2015, Sterling refinanced $700mil worth of Mets debt. Reports came out that the Mets were ‘close to being profitable’, though we must remember that any interest payments on this 5-year refinancing is not included in the balance sheets as an operating expense.

d.     Sterling owns 60% of the New York Mets and 65% of SNY, which means they also own 60% of the Mets $700mil debt. Needless to say, this team is far from rebounding from the Madoff days.

e.     The resale value of the New York Mets in 2017 (Forbes Magazine) was approximately $2Bill, based on $322mil revenue, and an operating income of $31.7mil.

Listen, I want a great team, like the Dodgers and Yankees, and I’d love to spend the kind of money they do on their teams, but you don’t walk into a bank like Bank of America (the bank that refinanced the Mets) and ask them for $700mil and tell them that you are going to return this team to being a profitable business by trading for a new third baseman.

The Wilpons operate this team just like they do their other retail properties. In this case, Sandy is their landlord and collects the rent.

Never forget that this team’s first obligation is to the people that have loaned them the money to operate, then their stockholders, and lastly, the people who attend the games, park their cars there, buy Mets merchandise, eat at the concessions, etc.

(unconfirmed sources have informed me that the Mets are looking to change all sales of food and other items sold inside the stadium, to ‘cash only’, so they can eliminate the fees charged by credit cards)

The only way… I repeat… the ONLY way fans can change things here is to stop going to home games and pouring money into their pockets. If you change the direction the profit and loss graphs are going on this team, it will influence the investors (banks) to alert Sterling that they might call in their loans if the Mets don’t turn this around.

It will take you more than a season, but a sale could be the end result if you pull this off. The team has a $2B+ sale value, far covering the debt. It would leave Sterling a hefty profit from the $391M they paid for the team in 2002.

What is that expression? “It takes a mountain?” Or was it a river.  Whatever…

Call the home office and ask for Fred, Jeff, or Saul. None will come to the phones, but you will drive the operators crazy there (of course, I’m probably wrong here and Sterling has installed one of those systems that you never speak to a human voice).

Leave them a message. Invite them to your house for dinner. Ask them to meet your friends outside next Saturday. Invite them to a hockey game.

Tell ALL your Mets friends on Twitter to do the same.

You have the power.

Let me tell you a quick story.

I was one of the managers of the original WKTU-FM, “Disco 92”. We were the only radio station that played disco in NYC and we were rated the most listened to station in the city.

There was no commercial rap in those days, until The Sugar Hill Gang came out with the song “Rapper’s Delight”. It instantaneously became the most requested song on our call-in lines; however, we decided not to play it because we didn’t think rap music would make it in the long run (a bunch of us white guys made this decision) and, in the words of our programming consultant, “we didn’t have to play it”.

But here was the problem. The consultant that made that decision went to work every day to his office in Atlanta. I went to work in NYC where the request lines were set up next to my receptionist. We would average around 300 requests on a typical work day… we got an additional 2,000+ for Rapper’s Delight.

The end result was we added the song to return some sanity to our workday. 

We didn’t add it to make any listeners happy. Our consultant was correct. They already listened to us. But it made the radio station into a better business model.

You and your friends can turn the tide here, if you keep it up over what looks to be a probable painful season.

But if the team turns this around with the players they now have, and they literally go on to win the World Series, you have to STILL stay away from Flushing until either the banks or MLB steps in and makes the Wilpons divest their ownership.

If the team is two games out of first place, and they are about to start their last home series against the Nationals, and you show up and help fill up the stadium, all your efforts go out the window.

See? It does take a mountain.