Sunday, June 29, 2014

And, Speaking Of Suckers ...

... consider the current plight of the New York Mets, and their fans.  Even if you root for another team, or don't care about baseball at all, this is something that deserves your attention.

The Mets are one of two teams in the largest market in the country.  They have played there since 1962, when Major League Baseball expanded from 16 to 20 teams.  Despite many losing seasons, they have frequently drawn over 1 million fans a season and, often, more than 2 or even 3 million fans in a season.  In fact, in 2008, they drew over 4 million fans, in no small part because it was their last season at Shea Stadium, their home since 1964.  They have appeared in the World Series four times, and won twice.

But 2008 was also the last Mets season with a winning record.  Since then, the team has never won more than 79 games in a season and, despite playing their home games in a new, state-of-the-art ballpark, attendance has steadily declined over the past five and a half years.  They are currently on a pace to win only 74 games in 2014, and may fall below the 2 million mark in attendance for the first time since 1997.  And, in a city where star power is everything when it comes to fan support, the Mets only feature one true star (David Wright), five solid major league players (Jon Niese, Dillon Gee, Bartolo Colon, Curtis Granderson and Daniel Murphy), and 19 others who have bounced back and forth between Triple-A and The Show.

Even worse, the team's owners, Fred Wilpon, his son Jeff, and Saul Katz, nearly destroyed the team's finances by allowing a portion thereof to be used--oh, how it was used--by the notorious Bernard Madoff.  You would think that Bud Selig, who did not hesitate a second to use his best-interests-of-baseball powers to bail the Los Angeles Dodgers out of their own fiasco with family finances, would surely want to do the same thing on behalf of another of baseball's supposed flagship franchises.  But Wilpon has been a reliable support of Selig's on a number of the latter's initiatives as commissioner, and Selig values that support so much that he "loaned" baseball executive Sandy Alderson from the commissioner's office to Wilpon to serve as general manager and stabilize the team's money situation.

However, Alderson, who helped pioneer the "Moneyball" approach to building a roster that has helped the Oakland A's and other small-market teams compete, is an executive in name only, one who is forced to deal with constantly shrinking budgets and a lack of full authority in baseball matters.  And this has put Alderson in a position where he has been forced to tell Mets fans that the team won't spend more on getting better players unless the fans keep spending money to see the lesser ones lose.

It boggles my mind that the senior management of a major business can say to the public, with a straight face, that the business won't improve its product until you spend money to suffer with its inferior goods.  I think that this might be without any true parallel in American history, although it did bring to my mind Oral Roberts' threat to allow the Lord to take him if his supporters didn't set new contribution records.  But Alderson's embarrassing plea, in its own way, is an admission of the 1% mindset:  we don't exist for you, you exist for us.

Baloney.  Baseball is entertainment, and there are plenty of avenues for entertainment, especially in a city like New York.  Any Mets fans who fall for this line of reason only assures himself and herself that his or her money will be continued to get pocketed by Ownership (as the Wilpons and Katz like to call themselves).  The franchise of Tom Terrific, Mookie's roller through Buckner's legs, and Mike Piazza's 9/11 home run has sadly turned into the worst sort of Ponzi scheme:  one group of suckers begging its customers to play a similar role so that they can recoup their losses.

Don't let them do it.  Mets fans pay enough and suffer enough to deserve something better, like ownership that can and wants to invest in a product worth buying.  Stay home, turn off the TV and satellite radio, don't Google "Mets" on your computer, and force Fred, Jeff, and Saul to give you that ownership--by selling.

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