If you cover the Mets with any regularity, you quickly become familiar with just what a tin ear the entire organization has for media and public relations.
It is not just the big stuff, such as firing Willie Randolph at 3 a.m. or fighting publicly with Carlos Beltran over knee surgery. It is the hundreds and thousands of little things that are part of the daily process of running a baseball team. The Mets are consistently imperfect at getting out even the simplest of messages.
It has reached the point at which I routinely ask Mets officials how dumb their second-best idea must have been to go public with what they do.
And, of course, Fred Wilpon has been the longtime titular head of the franchise that couldn’t get its story straight. So I was not surprised by what Wilpon told the New Yorker. Actually, I was wondering what took him so long to say stuff this self-destructive.
Wilpon essentially found the worst time in his personal and franchise history to give you this message: My players are not very good. Thus, he is telling a fan base with diminishing interest in going to Citi Field that it is actually a good idea to stay away. Which, considering the Mets’ plight, would be like burning $100 bills in the parking lot for the rest of the season. He also just made general manager Sandy Alderson’s job more difficult by devaluing what should be strong trade assets; unless there is a team out there that wants to overpay for 70 percent of Carlos Beltran.
Sadly, this is not unfamiliar in the reign of Wilpon, to get exactly the opposite result of what their public relations geniuses had hoped to produce. For the Mets certainly let the New Yorker author, Jeffrey Toobin, into the organization’s universe in hopes of spinning some positive press at a time when there is so much negativity about the ownership family, the team and the connections to Bernie Madoff.
However, the sympathetic portions of the 11,000-word piece are elevator music now, background noise to Wilpon’s critical comments on Jose Reyes, David Wright and Beltran. Mets officials have said for years they wished fans knew how much Wilpon lives and dies with every pitch; that he is not a detached owner trying to pinch pennies, but rather an obsessive fan hungering for a champion.
Now that is no longer hidden. The most damning passages occur while an agonized Wilpon watches a game against the Astros. Wilpon decries that Beltran is inferior from what the Mets thought they bought; that Wright is a good kid, but no superstar; that the oft-injured Reyes is not going to be worth top-of-the-market dollars in free agency.
It would have sounded right from a talk-radio diehard. But from Fred Wilpon it was undignified, rude and — worst of all — counterproductive. He underscored the incompetence of a franchise that built around stars this flawed while subliminally telling both fans and teams interested in trading for these players to stay away.
It is, of course, another public relations debacle. Another time when the organization has been forced to backtrack, explain the inexplicable.
Anything good that has come out of this season now is soiled, including how well Reyes has been performing and how hard manager Terry Collins has the team playing. Reyes has roots here and badly has wanted to stay. Now before a first negotiating session, the Mets owner has told the shortstop the bucks will definitely stop here.
To this point, the players have refused to badmouth ownership for bringing its personal plight to the clubhouse. How about now?
And how does Wright feel? He just played hurt for a couple of weeks. He has spent years standing in front of his locker, professionally accepting the role of player spokesman; offering hopeful words amid the hopelessness; pledging his allegiance to this ownership by painting pictures of a better tomorrow. Why would he ever do any of that again?
Fred Wilpon had done so much for so long to limit his availability to the media. And then either he had this bright idea or his inept public relations strategists did to make him available for weeks and weeks, to give a talented magazine writer this: Fred Wilpon, unplugged. The result, familiarly, has blown up on the Mets; cue the clown music.
What was the second-best idea that they dismissed as too dumb?