Funds denied

A billion dollar lawsuit. A pile of debt. A third straight losing season. Now a sorely needed deal to stabilize the team's finances is dead. For the New York Mets, the hits keep on coming.

Fred Wilpon, owner of the New York Mets, has had an interesting few months to say the least.

He’s been deeply involved with his close friend Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. He’s had a $1 billion lawsuit levied against him. He’s publicly bashed his own players. And now he has run one of the summer’s few positives out of town. I’m pretty sure at this point Webster’s dictionary can go ahead and swap “naïve” with “Fred Wilpon.”

It seemed almost impossible that New York Mets could ever lose money. They play in the premier sports market in the world and have a brand new ballpark and one of the most exciting players in baseball. Yet, the Wilpons have found a way.

It really wasn’t even that hard when you think about it. Blow a few million here on Luis Castillo, a couple more on Oliver Perez and spend $60+ million on Jason Bay. Mix in a lack of playoff games four years running and you’ve got the perfect recipe for financial disaster.

So with some hefty debt and an even heftier lawsuit hanging over their heads, the Mets began looking for someone to buy a minority share in the team.

It was a peculiar deal from the start; why someone would want to even get involved with the Mets? Why give money to a floundering team without getting any real say in the operations? Why hand over hundreds of millions of dollars to a family that has consistently failed at running a baseball team? The deal’s only perk was that, if the Wilpons were unable to retain control of the team, the new minority owner would be first in line to buy the Mets. This seemed obvious to David Einhorn but, apparently not so much to Fred Wilpon.

David Einhorn is almost the antithesis of the Wilpons: a shrewd businessman who made his fortune shorting the financial crisis. He fit perfectly with the style of the Mets’ new front office, which puts advanced statistics, savvy decision making and of course, logic, over everything else. When he emerged as the leading candidate to buy into the Mets, fans were giddy. The on-field product was struggling, but at least they were amassing a power group at the top.

That is, of course, until the morning of September 1, when the Mets announced they would no longer make a deal with Einhorn.

It will likely never be exactly clear as to why the deal fell through, but it appears that one of the key issues was that Einhorn tried to clear a path for him to purchase the team outright.

Early in the negotiations, Forbes reported that Einhorn would buy a stake in the team for $200 million. If the Wilpons failed to pay that back within three years, Einhorn would be allowed to purchase a controlling share of the team for an additional dollar. Boiled down, the deal was essentially a large loan: Einhorn gave the Mets $200 million and the Wilpons put up the team as collateral.

It seems that Einhorn tried to go a step further, attempting to get pre-approval from Major League Baseball’s other owners to purchase the Mets in the event the Wilpons were forced to sell. This did not sit well with Fred. He worked hard to block that vote, and eventually the conflict led to the deal’s failure.

I’m sure it was an uncomfortable thought for Fred Wilpon that he could lose his team. But did he really think someone would hand over that kind of money just to sit in owners' box with him?

This, I’m sure, is a drastic oversimplification of a complicated process. But it shows yet again just how out of touch Wilpon is with the world. How he failed to understand that someone would not just give him the money to piss away on more useless free agents.

While Wilpon may have rid himself of the pest that is Einhorn, the Mets still need cash. They are on pace to lose 80+ games for the third year in a row and will miss the playoffs yet again. They also are poised to hand over a $130+ million contract to Jose Reyes, but even that will not put them much closer to winning the division anytime soon. Their problems are going nowhere.

But of course, Fred Wilpon has an idea. He plans to sell parts of the team to family and friends. Which I’m sure can’t backfire…