Mike's Mets - The Road Not Taken

 

By Mike Steffanos

I spend a lot of time thinking about the New York Mets. Fortunately for my mental health, it's been a much more pleasant experience since Steve Cohen bought the team than it was previously. Sure, 2021 didn't turn out to be the year that Mets fans hoped for, but the club has done a good job addressing the root causes of last season's disappointment — at least until the lockout brought MLB operations to a halt. Conversely, in the final years of the Wilpon ownership, time spent pondering the Mets inevitably brought on persistent feelings of helplessness and despair.

I still think about the Wilpons from time to time, although I obviously don't miss them. They were pretty awful owners. It was sad, really. Fred Wilpon unquestionably loved the Mets and desperately wanted them to succeed. Indeed, after the sale went through, several pieces in the local papers went out of their way to laud Fred as a genuinely nice man who didn't deserve all of the criticism he received for his time running the franchise. This, of course, conveniently ignored the shameless record of failure that characterized Wilpon's tenure controlling the Mets.

The facts speak for themselves. From August 2002, when Wilpon bought out his partner Nelson Doubleday and assumed sole control of the franchise, through November 2020, when he sold the club to Steve Cohen, Wilpon's Mets missed the playoffs an astonishing 16 of 19 seasons. Of course, friendly pundits liked to give Fred slack for what happened after December 2008, when Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme came crashing down upon its investors. But the facts don't argue in favor of letting Wilpon off the hook.

For some background, it's important to remember how dependent Fred Wilpon was on those sweet Madoff dollars when it came to running the Mets. It's unlikely that Wilpon would have been able to buy out Doubleday without those massive returns from his Madoff investments. And once the Wilpons did assume control, the club's indifferent record over the years didn't produce the profits necessary to fund the operation. The only reason the Mets could maintain large payrolls in those years was thanks to the outsized returns from Bernie Madoff.

Infamously, the Wilpons' ability to maintain large-market payrolls ended abruptly when Bernie Madoff's arrest brought those too-good-to-be-true returns to a screeching halt, ending the flow of vital cash into the Mets organization. This is correctly seen as the beginning of the end for Fred Wilpon's ownership of the Mets. However, I've always looked at the years from Madoff's arrest up to the sale of the club to Steve Cohen as a real missed opportunity for both Wilpon and Mets fans.

It's not that the period from August 2002 through December 2008 was a stellar era in Mets history, despite the extra money they had to spend. During those seasons, the team's record was a mediocre 569-563, despite the 97-win 2006 team that made it to the NLCS. While that 2006 season was a lot of fun for fans like myself, there was no foundation for sustained success. The farm system mainly was bare. There was almost no depth, particularly with pitching, which led directly to the heartbreaking collapses in 2007 and 2008. Even before the Madoff story broke, it was apparent that the Mets were not a well-run organization. Without the Madoff cash, things became quite hopeless.

I've often wondered over the intervening years what might have happened if Fred Wilpon had taken the Madoff disaster as a wake-up call. Any objective look at the team's finances would have forcefully demonstrated that things would have to change dramatically for the Wilpon family to continue to control the Mets franchise. Without that windfall from Madoff, the Mets would have to operate in a much different manner going forward. As successful teams in much smaller markets have figured out, it takes adhering to sound business principles and spending money wisely to flourish when you're operating a team on a budget.

What if Fred had taken note of these successful teams and committed to emulating them? Wilpon's money people must have certainly let him know that the club payrolls would be significantly impacted for the foreseeable future. Remember, the team not only was operating without the Madoff windfall but was also responsible for paying money back to the trustee appointed by the courts. Taking on minority partners and receiving loans from MLB would keep the Mets afloat, at least for a while. Still, the payrolls would remain embarrassingly small despite the size of the New York market.

The Mets could have succeeded with much smaller payrolls had Wilpon directed them to pivot and place more significant resources into the farm system. An investment in that area could have paid off in a few years with cheaper home-grown talent that these other clubs have developed, even if it meant the Mets taking a step back in the short-term. Realistically, the only way back to spending commensurate to their market size was by becoming more profitable by succeeding on the field.

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