Mets owner Fred Wilpon decided to do an extensive interview with Jeffrey Toobin on New Yorker magazine to rehabilitate his image. Obviously, he’s been under fire financially and painted as a crook by the Madoff trustee. That may or may not be true. I don’t know.
What better way to clear your good name than doing an extensive profile with a respected magazine journalist? Well, sometimes it’s better to just keep your mouth shut if you don’t have anything good to say. This just appears to be another example of the bumbling Mets owner being disconnected from reality. Or maybe living in his own reality that nobody else ever gets to visit.
The profile is about Wilpon’s rise from rags to riches. Frankly, it’s a pretty boring story. If you go directly to page 7, you’ll see that it isn’t so boring when it comes to his feelings about some prominent Mets players. David Wright isn’t a superstar. Jose Reyes won’t get Carl Crawford money in free agency. Wilpon was a schmuck for signing Carlos Beltran to the contract they agreed on and isn’t the player he used to be. And Ike Davis is a good hitter on “a shitty team”.
Those are some opinions that we, as fans, talk about with regularity. But the owner of the Mets need to show some professionalism, diplomacy, and maturity. None of which are exhibited here. The same guy that built Citi Field filled with Dodgers memorabilia and forgot that it was the Mets stadium feels he can throw stones at players in such a public way. It’s really ugly.
I’ll be curious to find out what the fallout from the players is. How long do you think it will take for Fred to publicly apologize and claim that his comments were taken out of context? Throw the reporter under the bus. That’s my guess as to how this plays out.
Ultimately, the players are who they are and the market should give them what they deserve. My friend Todd that comments here as “TD” emailed me today and wondered if the MLBPA would file a complaint for Fred potentially costing Reyes money in free agency with his negative comments about his market value.
There are so many layers to this. Only the Mets could get involved in something this stupid. Only the Dodgers are in worse shape and not by much.
The Mets Report 