The Chris Moeller Archives

The owners, through their top ranking employee, Commissioner Bud Selig, began forcing the sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers when owners Frank and Jamie McCourt began divorce proceedings in 2009. Selig has fought the McCourts every step of the way, challenging Frank McCourt's bid to auction off media rights as a way to finance retention of the team. He fought his attempts to sell naming rights to Dodger Stadium, and now his bid to maintain control of the potentially profitable land surrounding Dodger Stadium even as the team has gone up for bid.

While the financial insolvencies of the two National League clubs on opposite coasts would seem to be vastly similar, the big difference between the two, seemingly, is that Fred Wilpon is a three-decade member of the baseball owners "fraternity" and McCourt has only been in the game since 2004. McCourt has not asked for an emergency loan from Major League Baseball, but Wilpon and the Mets took one of $25 million in 2010, and then failed to repay it on time. MLB has a rule, established by the new labor agreement, that debt of a club cannot be more than 12 times its cash flow, but nine teams, including both the Mets and the Dodgers, are said to have been out of compliance with that in 2011.

It comes down to the same issue that it always comes down to in Major League Baseball-- the league's ridiculous argument that the commissioner is a figure of benign independence, acting in the best interests of the league-- for all parties involved, including the players and the fans. Ask Mets fans how that one's going? Because of Wilpon's profit-and-loss sheet, the team's player payroll for 2012 is dropping, in the course of just one season, from $142 million to $90 million. Carlos Beltran, Francisco Rodriguez, and Jose Reyes are all gone since this time last year, with the Mets not even making a bid in free agency for Reyes, the reigning league batting champion. That's a gutting of $52 million in player talent even as they play their home games in brand-new Bailout Field... er, Citi Field, which was constructed with major taxpayer input.

Selig supposedly has his reasons for the double-standard in treatment-- the two ownerships' differing attempts at refinancing, the way the McCourts' messy divorce proceedings have supposedly embarrassed baseball-- which is not an easy thing to do, by the way. (It's difficult to ponder how employing Bernie Madoff to handle your team's finances for a time, as Wilpon did, doesn't qualify as embarrassing the league also. It's been revealed that Madoff helped develop the Mets' strategy in which they negotiate long-term player deals with a high percentage of deferred money so that Wilpon and his partners could invest the money with Madoff and get paid before the players do.)

As far as news reports reveal, the difference in the cases is personal. Selig and Wilpon are long-time pals, going back as colleagues to even before the 1981 strike by the Players Association and the days when Marvin Miller still headed the union. In deference, Selig is probably waiting for the banks to tell Wilpon he has to sell. This is the shitty part of Selig's job. He was, of course, a long-time club owner himself, and only moved into the commissioner's chair when the clubs grew lax with the 70-plus year charade that the commissioner is not a puppet of the owners, finally just putting one of their own in the position in 1992. Now, Selig has to pretend he's neutral on the issue of Mets ownership when Wilpon, a long-time ally, helped place him where he is.

Wilpon needs to go. He's representative of today's economic system in the U.S. that more closely resembles a Banana Republic-- that is, the debt socialized and the profit privatized. The reason we have characters like Bernie Madoff and Fred Wilpon on the scene is because too many of the major players in high-finance have lost their fear of going out of business. This is because, typically, they aren't allowed to go out of business. But the New York Mets are not "too big to fail" under Wilpon's watch. They're lucky if they're in third place in the National League East.