As the curtain droops on another as-expected Mets season, let us not fail to credit outgoing commissioner Bud Selig for his sustaining contribution.
Mets ownership still appears beached, trying to extricate itself from its eagerly self-imposed relationship with no-questions-allowed Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. Whether Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz jumped in blind or jumped in knowing the score — or at least suspecting it — they jumped in with both feet.
But to suggest they jumped in as rubes — that they were duped by a con artist preying on their investment naivete, and thus previously had grown wealthy despite lacking financial sophistication — would be tough to swallow given that Madoff was the second such scammer they fed.
Before the Madoff story fully exploded, an investment firm started by Wilpon and Katz had to pay $13 million to settle claims that the firm knew or should have known about the possibility of fraudulent activity when it withdrew almost all of its $29 million investment with a Ponzi hedge-funder in Louisiana.
The chosen investment leader in that one was sentenced to 22 years. Add that to the 150 years to which Madoff was sentenced, and Mets ownership chose to buddy up, big-time, with two crooks who totaled 172 years in prison. Shucks, that’s even longer than Bobby Bonilla’s deferred payments!
Now, given that Madoff was Team Wilpon’s second trip down this crooked aisle, it should have been incumbent upon Selig, as MLB’s best-interests-of-The-Game guardian, to have demanded Wilpon and Katz sell the Mets, leave baseball and never come back.
Be it due to the team owners’ reckless investing, their abject greed or their willful negligence and stupidity, the commissioner should have determined they had proven they are too self-imperiled to own a big league club, even in the rustic hamlet of New York City.
But Selig went the other way: He approved MLB’s $25 million loan to the Mets, terms undisclosed as another matter of “You’re not allowed to ask any questions.”
What Selig never would have accepted from the assistant general manager of one of his auto dealerships, he allowed from the owners of the New York Mets.
Even in their post-Madoff mode, Wilpon’s Mets chose to rent Citi Field entrance space to one of America’s most dubious enterprises, Amway. In 2010, Amway paid $34 million in cash and provided $22 million in products to settle a long-running class-action lawsuit that accused the company and top-level distributors of fraud and operating a pyramid scheme.
So as the Mets continue to kick the same can down the alley, hoping to find the next Bartolo Colon, Marlon Byrd and perhaps Bernie Madoff — whomever it takes to at least make it seem better — Selig’s role in this recycled redundancy should not go unappreciated.
Selling out the Yankees’ legacy
It’s time for Michael Kay to make up his mind. Early this season during a Yankees telecast, he claimed no one “hates” all the farewell season attention “more than Derek Jeter.”
Wednesday, during his ESPN NY radio/YES simulcast, he defended Jeter’s and the Yankees’ attempts to cash in on the shortstop’s final season as simply supply-and-demand enterprise. If Jeter hates the attention, he loves the dough.
But selling Jeter’s last season isn’t the problem as much as the kind of sell it has become — both a big-ticket private autograph session money grab and a grab-every-dime, one-size-fits-all flea-market tube-socks kind of sell, neither of which well serves what has for years been sold to the public as “legendary Yankees class” in the living embodiment of Jeter.
Even many of Jeter’s biggest fans have been turned off.
And in a season in which Paul O’Neill, Tino Martinez and Goose Gossage were bestowed the same, sanctified Monument Park status as Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and Babe Ruth, and when tickets to Derek Jeter Day became the property of the Yankees’ official broker/scalper the instant the game was announced, there’s a desperate, dubious and sad sell tacked to everything about new Yankee Stadium and the New York Yankees.
It seems just-called-up Dilson Herrera already has that Mets batting strategy down. Tuesday, top of the first, two on, two out, he looked at a first-pitch strike right down the middle. He popped out on the next pitch, which was high and inside. Wednesday, top of the second, he took a first-pitch strike right down the pipe, then struck out swinging at 0-2 in the dirt.
Gary Drake, who listens to Yankees games from his home in Palermo, Italy, wonders if the Yankees will “call up some radio play-by-play broadcasters in September.”
McEnroe still cashing in on ‘Superbrat’ persona
IN 1995, after American Jeff Tarango was ejected from Wimbledon for verbally abusing a chair ump, he explained that his inspiration was John McEnroe. McEnroe indignantly responded that he had no idea what Tarango was talking about. But there’s McEnroe in a new Chase commercial — Nike logo conspicuous on his shirt — still cashing in on what Tarango was talking about: Screaming at match officials.
Readers’ Digest: Reader Patrick J. Sweeney asks if I caught the U.S. Open match between Milos Raonic and Kei Nishikori that ended at 2:26 Tuesday morning. No, Pat, but I did watch the one right after that.
Skip Evans of Robbinsville, N.J., after hearing ESPN’s Ron Jaworski speaking of how the Chiefs’ “third-level defenders” might pressure quarterbacks: “Can you run this through your ESPN Translator to see if ‘third-level’ means the same as defensive backs — corners and safeties — or if ‘third-level’ means the secondary.
“And if ‘third-level defenders’ play bump-and-run (now known as ‘press coverage’) does this make the third-level defenders first- or second-level defenders?”
Mike Duesler asks if anyone “can explain this ‘presence of mind’ comment I hear all the time. A player tips a pass then has ‘the presence of mind to catch it’? What else, at that moment, should his mind be doing?”
Finally, Bill Imbornoni suggests that with so many players suspended for the first four games, “Why doesn’t the NFL just start this season in Week 5?”
The NFLPA’s Dept. of BS (Bogus Sincerity) continues to mock the NFLPA’s credibility by releasing “heartfelt,” transparently similar “apologies” as “spoken” by suspended players. The latest came from 49ers’ recidivist Aldon Smith (suspended for nine games), whom the NFLPA quoted as so socially circumspect, we’re left to wonder why he was arrested for a second time, let alone a fourth.
The following appeared within an obituary for Angela Ancone-Jackson , 64, of Montclair, N.J., in Tuesday’s Star-Ledger: “She was an avid Knicks fan (pre-Isiah era only).”