Here’s the thing you need to re member about David Einhorn: He wasn’t riding into Flushing on a white steed with a ready-made plan to make the Mets champions again, or even to make them matter again.
No, from the moment he became involved in trying to purchase a chunk of the team back in May, he served two distinctly simple purposes for two wildly divergent factions of Mets-dom.
For the Wilpon family, he represented a human checkbook, a one-man bailout plan.
And for Mets fans, he represented the hope that someone, anyone other than the Wilpon family will own the team in the near future.
“This is a very disappointing day for me,” Einhorn said yesterday on a conference call hastily assembled hours after his $200 million deal with the Mets collapsed, the Wilpons apparently opting for a consortium of smaller investors to fulfill their immediate cash needs, the better to keep the team in family control for the foreseeable future.
It is more disappointing for that sizeable precinct of Mets fans that’s permanently washed its hands of the Wilpons, that’s tired of the family’s decade of desultory ownership, that believes — with cause — that their continued stewardship ensures a one-way ticket to invisibility in a city increasingly dominated by the Yankees.
From the moment Fred Wilpon assumed full control in 2002, the Mets have existed under dark skies and angry clouds. They are likely to finish under-.500 for the sixth time in 10 years. And the four years of prosperity all ended miserably, a gut-wrenching loss in the 2006 National League Championship Series sandwiched by September collapses in 2005, ’07 and ’08.
Worse, Wilpon ushered the team into calamity thanks to his naive (at best) or greedy (at worst) trust in Bernard Madoff. For many Mets fans, that has been the season’s chief rooting interest: hoping the anvil of financial ruin would finally chase the Wilpons away.
The Wilpons clearly believe their bill in the Irving Picard clawback suit will be modest enough that they can survive without Einhorn’s instant cash injection. In May, when their financial picture was much bleaker, they were far more vulnerable to Einhorn, who didn’t become one of the most powerful hedge-fund players in the country by making charitable donations to fellow millionaires.
Of course, from the start, even as the Wilpons and their mouthpieces insisted plenty of benefactors would be delighted to pour millions into their coffers without a say in the team’s operation, the whole concept was nonsense. People like Einhorn amass their fortunes in the first place precisely because they don’t entrust their investments on losing horses like the Wilpon-run Mets.
In May, the Mets were desperate enough to let the wolf inside Citi Field.
In September, in the eyes of the men who still own the Mets, the wolf and his appetites are no longer necessary evils. If you are a Wilpon, that is a splendid development.
If you are a Mets fan, it is less so.
Look, nothing has to be forever. In 1990, there was no more reviled figure in New York than George Steinbrenner. Yankee Stadium greeted his suspension with cheers and obscene chants. Twenty years later, his passing was greeted with sadness and tribute worthy of a president or a pope.
Much as Mets fans may detest what’s become of the team under Wilpon rule, it can’t match the bile Yankees fans once felt for Steinbrenner. But a funny thing happened between obscurity and oblivion for the Boss: His team regained its mojo, started winning championships again, all was forgiven.
That’s the Wilpons’ burden now, and their one possible salvation. They’re willing to endure and absorb almost anything — scorn, public humiliation, relentless failure — to keep their fingers wrapped around the team; even the sharpest Wall Street shark won’t pry them away until they choose to be pried.
They have what they want. Can they afford it? We’ll see in November, when it’s time to try and re-sign Jose Reyes. And we’ll see beyond, when it’s time to act like a big-boy team again. They say they’ll have the coin. Let’s see if they’ll also have the stones.