RIP Lorinda de Roulet, 1930-2025

[G-Fafif]

Lorinda de Roulet, who owned the Mets after her mother Joan Payson died in 1975 and before selling to the group headed by Nelson Doubleday n 1980, has died at 95.

https://newyorkmets.medium.com/rip-lorinda-linda-payson-de-roulet-8e902ae859c1

[Cowtipper]

She was still alive?

[MFS62]

She was elected team president of the Mets and named to its board of directors. She became the first woman to direct the day-to-day operations of a Major League baseball franchise.

RIP

Later

[kcmets]

Interesting, I thought she had long passed away. RIP.

I always thought her name sounded like something you'd

order at a snooty expensive French restaurant.

[G-Fafif]

I met a few members of her family during the holiday season in 2022 at a Mets-themed event. They were quite excited to be bringing her a team logo ornament for her tree.

[Edgy MD]

Back in the nineties, she auctioned off some of the prize pieces in her mother's art collection for charity. It seemed like the market exploded later, but I guess the market for a collection of Picassos is always exploding. I remember stumbling over the catalog or something.

I also guess it wouldn't be the strangest thing if some of those pieces ended up in Steve Cohen's hands, like her mom's ball team did.

[Centerfield]

I find it surprising that she's not reviled by an entire generation of Mets fans. I know everyone hates Grant (what are the chances he comes up in back to back subjects?). But Linda was the team president and Chairman of the Board. She's the one that handed the keys to Grant and allowed him to run it into the ground.

Of course, she's her own person, and she doesn't have to love the team, just because her mother did. But if you're given the keys to a team that means so much to so many people, you owe them a duty to put the club into capable hands.

[Edgy MD]

People certainly disliked her, but Grant's takeover was pretty complete before Mrs. Payson passed. Her shares passed into the control of her husband, who had other interests, and he pushed the team on his five kids. Running the club kind of bounced around like a hot potato among them, with none having much more interest than he did, until it landed in the lap of the youngest daughter. She was a fan, but knew nothing about management, and did not control the family fortune, making reinvestment problematic. (And in fairness, her mother's model was to run the team like a museum or opera house or other public institution.) So she let Grant be Grant for a few years until the family could get on the same page with regard to selling.

Many a family business falls on hard times the same way. Sometimes, the only one that can get you to march to the same beat was the one who died and left a mess.

When her daughters came up with the unpopular idea of securing a mule for a mascot, one of the proposed names was "Kranemule." That suggestion was passed on to Ed, and still being a competitive dude despite being winding down his less-than-stellar career, didn't particularly find the suggestion as affectionate as it was likely meant, and he suggested "deMulet" as an alternative.

I dinna know if that was the straw that broke the camel's back, but I kinna imagine ladies of polite society dinna like being compared to mules any more than professional athletes, and Krane ended his career on the outs with the family.

But the crash of the franchise in the late seventies is understood to have been almost synonymous with the deadline deals of 1977, and those were particularly associated with Grant, and to a lesser extent GM Joe McDonald, and the stadium, of course, became known as Grant's tomb.

Maybe she is the real villain, but narratives have a way of taking on a life of their own. The re-acquisition of Seaver, Kingman, and Staub in the early Doubleday, Inc. years was seemingly an attempt at canceling the sins against the fanbase that were still stinging, and the press kept Grant's name linked intimately to those sins.

Her husband was ambassador to Jamaica and kind of seen as a shady Nixon crony, and died of a heart attack in the wake of the collapse of the presidency.

(Man, 50 years is a long time to be a widow.)