The Mets are looking for a bailout to the tune of as much as $250 million for an ownership stake in the club, and though the Wilpons continue to maintain they won’t change how they run the team in the wake of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme scandal, some agents who have clients on the Mets roster are not so sure.
“It’s going to be interesting,” one agent said. “All you ever heard was them denying it would have anything to do with the baseball team and now it clearly has. Now that this is out, you have to wonder: What else is there that we don’t know?”
The uncertainty could have a bearing on how agents treat the Mets in future negotiations.
“If they do have a money-crunch, how is that going to impact what they do?” another agent said. “Do you have as good a chance to win there as you do somewhere else?”
General manager Sandy Alderson admitted it is not an ideal situation, but said he believes the agents’ concerns won’t come to fruition.
“Obviously, there’s a certain level of ambiguity surrounding this news,” he said yesterday during a conference call. “To some extent, the decision to find a minority partner or some other source of re-capitalizing the franchise is positive news, from my standpoint. If there was an initial problem before, that can only be positive.”
At least one agent agreed: “I think whatever the problem is will be straightened out . . . and I’d be shocked and surprised if it had any impact on what they do.”
But it’s not quite that simple, according to other player reps.
“It doesn’t sound good,” another agent said. “Hopefully, it all works out because everyone is better off with as many teams having healthy businesses as possible. Especially one like the Mets.”
“We’ll see what they do,” one agent said. “If they offer people money, people will take it. Fred Wilpon is a great businessman. He’s made a lot of money and he’ll do what he has to do. We’re looking at them as doing business as usual until we see something else, since there’s no real way of knowing what kind of impact any of this will have until there’s evidence.”