If you've ever watched the hit Showtime series, "Billions," you get a taste of the cutthroat world of big-time finance, and see life through the privileged prism of rather rich and savagely ambitious people.
The protagonist, Bobby Axelrod, is allegedly based on Steve Cohen - the hedge fund billionaire who made a fine offer to buy the Mets. But it seems that the Wilpons have balked, and Cohen has walked. This leaves the sale on life support, at best.
This is so singularly Mets.
The Wilpons aren't nixing the deal in a traditional sense. They just added dubious, last-second layers to the deal, all of which giving them more control of the club, including some snafu over the sale of SNY. If this were a romantic relationship, the Wilpons didn't dump Cohen. They just made the conditions so pointlessly difficult so that he had no choice but to breakup with them first.
Has anyone ever tried so hard to not get paid $2.6 billion? People who dwell in that high orbit say Cohen wanted to own the Mets so much he happily overpaid for 80% interest in the franchise. And Cohen would not have pinched pennies or shrunk in the shadow of the team from the Bronx. He would have run the Mets with a refreshing, voracious approach to winning.
No doubt the sale of a sports franchise is more intricate than the sale of a bicycle or movie ticket. But teams are bought and sold all the time, and few are met with the resistance or stubbornness that the Wilpons bring to their business. And if reports are true that they want to keep their corporate grip on SNY - their television broadcast arm and cash cow - then they never really wanted to sell the Mets in the first place. No one as smart and savvy as Cohen would buy a baseball club yet leave its most valuable property in the hands of the sellers.
The deal began with a foul air when we learned that Jeff and Fred Wilpon would hang around and run the club until 2025. Word is that they even wanted that stretched beyond five years. So it seems they just wanted to gain the quid while losing none of the control.
As someone in the hedge fund world told The New York Post, the Wilpons need this more than Cohen does. At 63 years old, with a war chest worth over $13 billion, Cohen doesn't need anything, or at least nothing that moves our middle-class needle. With his cash and cachet, Cohen can buy another sports franchise, or just build upon his billions. The Wilpons seem to be handling the sale the same casual way you buy gloves from a street merchant. Changing the price or terms at five minutes to midnight speaks to infighting or indifference or incompetence.
It would be easy to blame this busted deal on the super-rich, who live in a vacuum sealed world, where people cook for them, clean for them, and drive for them. Their problems don't register among our real-world sensibilities.
But this happens mostly to the Mets. In 2011, the Wilpons had all but sold the squad to David Einhorn, until some set of last-second demands (sound familiar?) drove Einhorn understandably bonkers. He left the table and the team, visibly and audibly upset with the Wilpons for not operating in good faith.
Some family-run sports teams can afford a black eye or black mark on their record because they've been around so long they've become synonymous with the team and town, doing so much for both that they've padded their PR backside. The Rooney family in Pittsburgh. The Mara family. Even the Steinbrenner name - despite the old man being suspended twice by MLB - has become coated in pinstripes. Look how happy every member of the Chiefs, from the janitor to the general manager, was to hand the Lombardi Trophy to the Hunt family.
The Wilpons will never have that kind of goodwill, nor have they earned your good graces. They've wanted a pass for years because they got bilked by Bernie Madoff. So if they are still feeling the sting of plunging personal wealth, you'd think the sale to Steve Cohen would be seamless. But nothing is ever that simple with the Wilpons, which is why we always say the same about the Mets.
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