There was a time when New York would tolerate the kind of empty, hapless ownership the Wilpons provide the Mets. We didn’t always live under Steinbrenner Law, believing our citizenship papers as New Yorkers entitled us to certain inalienable rights of sporting success.
The football Giants once went 18 straight years without making the playoffs, and it wasn’t until Year 15 when the anger finally resulted in someone hiring a plane to buzz a message over the Meadowlands.
We get all weepy about how things used to be when the Dodgers lived here, but Brooklyn won one championship in 77 years. The Knicks waited 23 years before winning their first title, and did so in a blissful, boo-free basketball city.
And, of course, there were the Mets of 1962-1967, whose average record was 54-108. And who were beloved anyway.
Yes, perhaps the Wilpons could operate in that kind of era, before New Yorkers understood that supporting a team wasn’t law, when fans’ expectations weren’t so high, their patience so thin.
Those were simpler times.
And not necessarily better ones, either.
Look, the idea that Jose Reyes is gone forever stings deeply if you invest yourselves in the Mets, the way casting free Darryl Strawberry did for one past generation, and the exiling of Tom Seaver did for another. If the Mets were owned by different people, they might even be able to sell the notion — and it’s a fair one — that a player who relies on his legs and has a history of leg problems isn’t worth six years and $106 million.
But they aren’t owned by different people. They are owned by the Wilpons, and the Wilpons have done nothing — they’ve done less than nothing — since buying out Nelson Doubleday to be given the benefit of this doubt, or any doubt. Do you believe they will take advantage of their newfound payroll flexibility to strengthen a team earmarked for fifth place? Do you believe they aren’t meddling with Sandy Alderson’s plans any time those plans involve digging into coffers that ring hollow and empty, like so many Wilpon promises?
Forget for a second the question of whether the Wilpons had any inkling what Bernie Madoff was up to; understand that without Madoff, they wouldn’t have had a prayer of being solo owners of the team in the first place. That deferred deal with Bobby Bonilla that earns them such ridicule now? Done because they believed they were smarter than everyone else, and entered into a dim-witted, house-of-cards arrangement that they somehow believed would yield an exclusive windfall.
Even if Madoff had been on the up-and-up, the Wilpons were gambling your baseball team on the volatile nature of Madoff’s feel for the Market; in truth, it would be like financing your house based solely on your betting-window performance at Aqueduct.
And they wonder why nobody trusts them to do the right thing? Ever? Bud Selig has never had the heart to deal with the Wilpons as he should have, but there will be another commissioner eventually. His first order of business needs to be dealing with the Wilpons the way Selig dealt with Frank McCourt.
All that rides on it is New York’s status as a legitimate two-team, big-league town. A standing that frays a little more every day the Wilpons own the Mets.