May 23 2011 07:17 PM
Wilpon Passes Burgers and the Buck
By HARVEY ARATON
Published: May 23, 2011
| We can easily envision Fred Wilpon in the lavish confines of his Citi Field box, munching on his Shake Shack burger and complaining to Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker about the performance of his marquee players in relation to their reputations and remuneration. Fred Wilpon complained about three of the Mets' marquee players in a New Yorker article. From one suffering Mets fan to another (Toobin discloses his rooting interest in a newly published article), Wilpon’s comments come across like barfly banter during an extended interview while watching his slumping Mets lose to the Houston Astros in April. The comments were obviously not conveyed in the madcap manner of a George Steinbrenner, whose player critiques — “Dave Winfield is Mr. May!” — were often delivered as angry, outrageous smears. Mets fans would agree with Wilpon that Jose Reyes is not worth “Carl Crawford money;” that David Wright is “a really good kid,” but “not a superstar;” and that Carlos Beltran is “65 to 70 percent of what he was.” But although Wilpon is no mean-spirited autocrat, he reveals himself to be a why-me whiner and a first-rate revisionist. He may have fingered himself as the dummy who gave Beltran $119 million in 2004 based on one productive postseason, but that is about all the accountability he serves Toobin along with the burgers. Wilpon gets even with Beltran, though. In his largely Teflon retrospective of the team’s “snakebitten” recent history, it was the called strike taken by Beltran to end the 2006 National League Championship Series that set off or symbolized all that has since gone wrong. Forget how Beltran and the others of a now-shamed era took just two seasons to turn what had been Wilpon’s 71-victory embarrassment of a team into a 97-victory division champion that fought into the ninth inning of Game 7 of the N.L.C.S. with just one experienced and reliable starting pitcher. Forget how Beltran, Reyes and Wright spearheaded the three highest season’s attendance records in Mets history — 3.37 million in 2006, 3.85 million in 2007 and 4.04 million in 2008, the last go-round at Shea Stadium. Forget how the Mets’ profitable cable television network, SNY, started in such timely fashion on the backs of the aforementioned players and under the leadership of the since-departed and widely discredited Omar Minaya and Willie Randolph. As bitterly as those seasons ended, how much were they worth to a franchise whose desperate financial straits have far more to do with its owners than its players? And although Wilpon’s comments in The New Yorker article are supplementary to a profile of him and an examination of the continuing Bernard L. Madoff imbroglio, they seem to follow in the pattern of a one-size-fits-all defense: When life and profits are good, everyone is Fred Wilpon’s friend, part of a big, happy family. When caught in a downpour of misfortune, he seems to feel victimized and betrayed by everyone who failed to remind him to carry an umbrella. How a $1 billion suit brought against Wilpon and his partner, Saul Katz, plays out is up to them and Irving H. Picard, the trustee who is seeking the money on behalf of Madoff victims. But the baseball record should be set straight in the wake of Wilpon’s self-serving New Yorker comments, however uncharacteristic. Many flawed performers have contributed to the Mets’ recent miseries, including Beltran, Reyes and Wright. But to publicly diminish them (while perhaps damaging their trade value) without acknowledging ownership’s role in the organizational dysfunction that engulfed the Mets after the 2006 postseason borders on deceit. Even after Beltran succumbed without a full swing of the bat in the N.L.C.S., the Mets were doing fine until a subversive element in the franchise core tore at the fabric of what Randolph and Minaya had so quickly quilted. Was it the lone destabilizing influence of Tony Bernazard, a former Minaya crony who ultimately was exposed and fired? Or was it as many suspected — an inside job by Jeff Wilpon, who overreacted to the N.L.C.S. failure and set out to fix what wasn’t broken by virtue of the crown of entitlement placed upon his head by Daddy? It all feels like ancient history now, but that doesn’t mean the Mets weren’t run on so many levels like a college fraternity house — right down to the longtime clubhouse manager, Charlie Samuels, whose shadow business of allegedly stolen memorabilia landed him in the arms of the law. Wilpon has been steadfast in his legal entanglements, guaranteeing vindication of the charges made by Picard that he and Katz were willfully ignorant of the Madoff crimes and profited at the expense of others. It is a complicated case, and maybe Wilpon, who had more than $500 million invested with Madoff when the scheme was exposed, has a right to feel like a victim, no matter what the outcome is. But the collapse of the Mets is more on his house than it is on Carlos Beltran, Jose Reyes or even Oliver Perez. Yes, Wilpon’s comments were made in the context of a game, in the mind-set of a fan. But he is no ordinary fan. He is the owner. He, above all, is accountable. If he wants to find fault, look first in the mirror. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/sport ... ubles.html
