Fred Wilpon (above), who will not sell the Mets to a firebrand such as Mark Cuban, appears indifferent to the continued suffering of his team’s fans. (Charles Wenzelberg/New York Post)
I am not an accountant. I do not have access to financial records of the Wilpon family and even if I did, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what I was looking at. I don’t have to know how badly the Bernie Madoff wrecking ball obliterated the Wilpons’ wealth, or the Mets’ resources, and neither do you.
We have our suspicions, of course.
But here’s the thing: Even if the Wilpons were knocked flat by Madoff’s magic calculators, even if there really isn’t as much money at their disposal as a major-market team should have — and the Mets always have denied that to be the case — that isn’t the most troublesome touchstone of the present ownership of the Mets. It isn’t insolvency that is driving many Mets fans to distraction and driving others clear away.
It’s indifference.
It is the inability — or unwillingness — to express from the top the kind of anger that has been brewing on the other side of the moat for four years now. Nobody is asking Fred or Jeff Wilpon to begin channeling George Steinbrenner, circa 1977. But there comes a time when the people who pay money to watch their baseball team need reassurance that the men who bank that money are just as aggravated, just as agitated.
And this is what we get from Jeff Wilpon: silence. And this is what we get from Fred Wilpon: silence, interrupted only by his hurried assurances on Friday that general manager Omar Minaya’s job is safe, and that Jeff is doing an “excellent” job as “everybody knows,” and I’ve been trying to figure out which dictionary defines “everybody” the way Fred does, if it’s Merriam-Webster or Oxford.
So Mets fans are left to stew, and more than a few of them have decided it’s worth neither the blood nor the sweat if the owners don’t see fit to bleed and sweat alongside them. They stare wistfully at the sporting horizon and see Mark Cuban, denied once in a bid for the Cubs and just this week in a bid for the Rangers.
Cuban? Now there’s a guy who would suffer and ache right alongside you. There’s a guy who would have had something to say in the wake of the Mets’ impersonation of their 1962 forebears the other night in Atlanta besides offering votes of confidence and high grades of “excellent!” to the men in charge of creating such a calamity. Of course, even if the Mets were for sale — which they are not — baseball has proven to be no fan of Cuban, so that’s a fantasy best left behind.
Here’s the thing, though. You don’t need to be flamboyant to reach your fans. Who is more staid, more proper, than John Mara? And yet in the wake of last year’s Giants meltdown, this is what the co-owner of the team had to say:
“This is probably as disappointed as I’ve ever been in my life at this team. Given the expectations that we had this year, given the roster I thought we had, I’m disappointed in everything, I’m unhappy at everybody. It’s just not acceptable to perform like that. There are 8-8 seasons and there are 8-8 seasons. This one felt a lot more like 2-14.”
And you know what that did for Giants fans? It energized them. It made them excited for 2010, because they had irrefutable evidence that the owner’s office was as disgusted as they were. We haven’t heard anything remotely like that from the Mets’ owners, and aren’t likely to. If their baseball team bothers them, it’s high time they let their fans know about it. Before those fans start treating the team the way they believe the owners do.
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VAC’S WHACKS
* When baseball games can be decided by balls hitting catwalks, as one was in Tampa on Thursday afternoon, they ought to just use sewer caps to figure out the scoring.
* It is a small sample, sure. But I’d have to say that what AMC has done, backing up “Mad Men” with “Rubicon,” gives us as close to a night of must-see TV since NBC’s Thursday night lineup of yesteryear.
* Here’s the thing about the NFL: just when you can gather up enough steam to believe that Darrelle Revis is right to squeeze every penny he can out of the Jets, you see the Broncos lose Elvis Dumervil, maybe for the year, after emptying the bank for him . . . and you can understand the team’s side of things, too. Brutal, brutal game.
* I knew I was being set up for a bad practical joke when I looked the moves the Knicks have made this summer — the latest being Roger Mason — and I’d liked every single one . . . and then here came Isiah Thomas to slip the whoopie cushion on my La-Z-Boy.
WHACK BACK AT VAC
Tony Magla: How did Mike Pelfrey turn into Oliver Perez overnight? Doesn’t the pitching coach have to assume some responsibility here? Is it mechanics? Is it lack of confidence? Is it an undisclosed injury? Whatever it is, Dan Warthen and Pelfrey get paid big bucks to figure it out.
Vac: As bad as things have gotten for the Mets, if only Pelfrey had maintained something similar to his early-season level, they might still be in range. At some point, you wonder if it’s ever going to click for a player.
Thad Brown: Both Omar and Jerry have to go, but who replaces them? Bobby Valentine? How about the former Phillies manager coaching third for Joe Torre? I loved Larry Bowa’s tantrums in Philly. You can imagine his fits when the Mets start kicking the ball around and throwing it where doesn’t belong.
Vac: And best of all, you’d have to imagine that Bowa would kill himself — absolutely kill himself — to beat the Phillies. The Mets could use a little of that.
Calvin Castine: I was in my car, listening on the radio, when Sunday’s Yankees lineup was announced and couldn’t believe it. When you play a contender in your division, you’re really playing two games instead of one, so that loss was the difference between being three games up or just one up. Girardi gave them two days off and one day’s rest. Bad math and a bad move.
Vac: Lots of Yankees fans are angry about that move and with good reason: If the Yanks finish a game behind the Rays, the reward for those days off could be facing Cliff Lee twice in a five-game series. There are a lot of games against the Royals/Indians/Orioles to take off.
Sean Fowler: I sense an 8-8 season for the Jets. Did everyone forget they practically needed divine intervention just to make the playoffs last year? I, for one, do not. Allow me this caveat, though . . . if they somehow manage to do you-know-what, I will beg for a three-year work stoppage, just to savor it for as long as possible.
Vac: And that, in summary, is the beauty of fandom, isn’t it?