Baseball Is Looking Better Than Ever?Unless You’re a Mets Fan

Baseball Is Looking Better Than Ever?Unless You’re a Mets Fan

Sam Schube: Baseball Is Looking Better Than Ever?Unless You’re a Mets Fan

Earlier this week Michael Kazin celebrated baseball?s opening day (Thursday!), when hope springs eternal, grass grows green, and beer runs cold. ?Compared to the dysfunction, scandal, and discontent commonplace in other professional sports,? he wrote, ?baseball is looking better than ever.? That?s in large part true. Baseball is, for the moment, relatively peaceful: the steroids terror seems to have passed, Moneyball was a hit, and most games end without a concussion.

But from where I sit, things do not look so rosy: a quick glance at the New York Mets, my hometown team, yields a substantially more deflating picture of the state of the game. When they open their season on Thursday at the ill-named Citi Field, they’ll be facing empty seats galore (a fate until recently reserved for the Florida?now Miami?Marlins). As Capital New York?s Howard Megdal points out, the Mets still have plenty of unsold tickets on hand, while ?small-market? teams like the Tampa Bay Rays, Baltimore Orioles, and Pittsburgh Pirates will host full houses. After drawing an average of 38,941 fans per game in Citi Field?s inaugural season in 2009, attendance has dropped to 31,602 and 29,044 per in the last two years.

That?s too bad for owning partners (and brothers-in-law) Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, who need to come up with $162 million to settle a lawsuit brought by victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. (Wilpon and Katz were long-time Madoff investors, and somehow managed to make $300 million by the end of the ordeal.) The quickest way to increase revenues is to raise attendance, and the fastest way to do that is to put an attractive product on the field. The Mets, however, spent the offseason shedding a projected $52 million dollars in player salary for 2012, which would represent the largest single-season cut in baseball history. Instead of re-signing shortstop José Reyes, the team?s most exciting and downright joyful player, the Mets picked up two middling relief pitchers and a center fielder who hit .220 last year (to non-baseball fans: that is not very good). Who could blame fans for choosing to spend their money elsewhere?

While Wilpon insists that these cuts are part of a larger strategic plan, it?s hard not to see this as the indebted millionaire?s version of ransacking the couch for spare change. General manager Sandy Alderson let slip during the winter that the team lost $70 million in 2011, and the Mets brass recently organized the sale of twelve minority ownership stakes for $20 million a pop.

Through it all, Wilpon and upper management have continued to deny that the whole Madoff shebang has had any effect on how the club is run. For now, we can only talk correlation, not causation: the ownership group remains irresponsibly indebted?having borrowed in recent years against the team, the team?s cable network, and the team?s stadium?and the players who trot onto the field on Thursday would be lucky to see playing time with the Mets? ostensible rivals. For now, the Mets are being run as a small-market club. Assembling a successful team on a budget requires investing in younger, minor-league players, a process that takes years and resources. Wilpon, it would seem, has neither.

It does not have to be like this. Although the Mets look like an overleveraged pre-recession bank (like the one burning in neon above their doorstep), Major League Baseball reserves the right to regulate owners? conduct. This is exactly what happened last summer, when Commissioner Bud Selig decided that Frank McCourt, the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, was dealing with his personal finances at the ball club?s expense. Citing ?further diversion of Dodgers assets for the personal needs of Mr. McCourt,? Selig determined that a proposed television deal ?would not be in the best interests of the Los Angeles Dodgers franchise, the game of baseball and the millions of loyal fans of this historic club.? Soon after, Selig appointed an MLB representative to take over day-to-day operations of the club and set about finding prospective buyers. Last week the team was sold to a group led by L.A. legend Magic Johnson for a healthy $2 billion dollars. Selig could, of course, do the same with the Mets, whose owners seem equally cavalier with their finances. Instead, the league extended a secret $25 million loan to the team during the 2010 season, which Wilpon paid back earlier this month. Selig and Wilpon are old friends, but that hardly justifies such a blatant double standard.

So if you?re a fan of basically anyone but the Mets, you can say that the sport is in great shape heading into the 2012 season. Hell, even as a Mets fan, I look forward to spending woozy-hot afternoons in the bleachers at Shea (oops?I mean Citi), growing to love unfamiliar, halfway-talented players as the season lopes into the summer. Still, it will be hard to overlook the nonsense playing out in the stadium?s offices and luxury suites, the kind of economic sleight-of-hand and double-speak we?re used to seeing on Wall Street. ?You get to drink beer and yell at the umpire,? Michael Kazin wrote. Can we yell at the owners, too?

Photo of Citi Field by Sam Smith, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons