batmagadanleadoff

I can't believe this is even a debate. Fred said that payroll was trimmed "in part" because of "debt". Does anyone here think that Fred wasn't referring to Madoff debt? The Mets sold 49% of the team a few years ago to a select group of investors, including Bill Maher. Does anyone think that the proceeds from those sales wasn't used to pay back Madoff debt -- i.e., non Mets related debt? You know, the Mets have a powerful financial incentive to not invest in the team. MLB allowed the Mets to use the team as collateral against the various outstanding enormous loans. So if Fred and Saul, for example, suddenly find a spare $20M under the couch cushion and must now decide whether to use the new-found money to either increase payroll or to pay down more of the debt --- from a strict financial POV, the smarter play is to pay down the debt. $20M applied to debt is a $20M increase in the equity that the owners have in the team. It's essentially $20M in the owners' pocket in the long run. But $20M invested in the team doesn't guarantee a $20M increase in team revenue or even an increase in team performance. Putting that money to payroll is riskier, investment-wise. You can thank the lords of baseball for letting the owners essentially mortgage the Mets to pay back Madoff debt, and then chuckle as they torture themselves to tell you that this is different than the McCourt thing.

Edgy MD wrote: It's that he's a fake journalist playing at professionalism. Could you clarify this? I'm not sure what you mean by this. It sure does sound like a mouthful, though.

Edgy MD wrote: That NBC story is just piggybacking on Megdal. Good. No. Great. Grrrrrrrrreat! Like Tony the Tiger would've said it. I know how repetitive Megdal must seem to many here, but it'd be fine with me if Megdal, instead of rehashing essentially the same Mets and Madoff story twice a month, regurgitated that same story twice a day. Megdal probably isn't effective here because this forum is, for the most part, comprised of hard-core, extremely knowledgeable Mets fans who know all this. But you'd be surprised how many Mets fans there are out there that are sorta clueless about the front office's escapades and dire financial situation. And the situation is so outrageous, so fucking scandalous, with MLB looking the other way and whitewashing the whole Mets/Madoff affair, insulting every knowledgeable Mets fan along the way by refusing to acknowledge that anything is wrong, that the story should be told as often as possible. I never get bored of reading these pieces. It's an outlet for my frustrations with the owners. Maybe if the story is repeated ad nauseum, then, just maybe, MLB might bow to the extreme pressure that should be put on it but isn't, to finally give this ownership group the boot that it deserves.

Ceetar wrote: I don't understand the teeth gnashing over Heyward. Half his value is run-prevention and it's very clear that run-creation is the Mets need. Is there a difference in value between a player that creates x runs of offense for his team over the course of a season and a player who prevents the opposition from scoring x runs over the course of a season? If the Mets were shutting out the opposition game in and game out, then I could definitely see your point. But I doubt that the Mets run prevention (pitching and defense combined) is at a level that would render Heyward's defense as superfluous.

Frayed Knot wrote: Just out of curiosity I went looking at what kind of off-season moves the 2014 Royals made after their 89-win / WS-losing season * 7 of their starting 9 position players returned. They swapped out Nori Aoki for Alex Rios in RF -- a move which essentially wound up as a net negative [710 OPS to 640] and at DH Billy Butler was swapped for Kendrys Morales -- a net positive at it turned out [702 OPS to 847] although that was hardly a given as Morales was coming off a lousy and partial 2014: 632 OPS in 200+ AB * On the pitching side: James Shields left as a FA and was replaced by Edinson Volquez which resulted in pretty much the status quo [14 wins, 3.21 ERA/1.18 WHiP vs 13, 3.55/1.31] They signed Chris Young as a 5th starter/swingman: a guy who had made a total of 60 starts total over the six seasons from 2008-2013 but gave them 18 starts + 16 relief apps with a 3.04 / 0.96 Signed Ryan Madson to replace Aaron Crow in the bullpen -- another move which worked out great [2.13 / 0.93] even though Madson hadn't thrown an official pitch since 2011 * Then at the trading deadline they added Zobrist & Cueto The 2015 squad wound up scoring 73 more runs in 2015 than in '14 (6th best in AL) while allowing 17 more (3rd best) and winning seven more games. In both seasons they played to five games better than their pythagorean projections. Even if this is all true --and I'm not saying it isn't, Kansas City shouldn't be the baseline or gauge by which to measure the Mets. That's because Kansas City is in Kansas City. Now if I was paying Kansas City rent or Kansas City mortgage, then maybe ....

Edgy MD wrote: 1970s Baseball gives us 20 facts you may not know about Dave Kingman. I was just thinking about Kingman this week. He's one of the most fascinating players, ever, really, and I was surprised that there isn't a biography of Kingman out there. I suppose Kingman's not exactly the cooperating type either, but time does change things.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: Come on. JUST like McCourt? That's ridiculous. I mean, McCourt cursed more, and had a crazy wife. And weather! Nicer weather. And a different time zone and stuff. lol. I don't necessarily have a problem with that because it's all Wilpon and Katz money anyways, and they can do whatever they want with their money. It's theirs, and the Mets are a private company without any shareholders or publicly traded stock prices to concern themselves with. It's no different than any other business. That my favorite pizzeria had their best year ever money-wise doesn't give me the right to demand that the owner upgrade the lousy air-conditioning instead of splurging for a new Mercedes-Benz. All I can do is to stop eating at that pizzeria. My problem, though, is that MLB ousted McCourt for doing what the Mets owners are doing. Another reason why Wilpon seems to have hunkered down and dug in to maintain ownership of the Mets at all costs, besides the vanity and the psychic value that comes from owning a professional team, especially a jewel like the Mets, is that the owners' equity in the team, at least as a percentage of the value of the team, is low. They took out multi-hundred million dollar loans to pay back those non-Mets expenses and used the team as collateral or security for those loans. What the owners essentially did is to mortgage the Mets to pay back the Madoff incurred debt. The "mortgage" arrangement now links the Madoff related debt to the team. It means, I suppose, that if the owners ever do sell, the "mortgage" debt would get paid first as a condition of the loan, just like a home mortgage, and the owners wouldn't receive anywhere near the full value of whatever the team sells for -- just like a homeowner that sells a million dollar home with an outstanding $600K mortgage pockets no more than $400K from the sale of the home. Maybe, as Wilpon sees it, there's not enough profit in selling the Mets right now. That's the problem, as I see it. That MLB would let the owners use the Mets as security on such an enormous loan, especially when the underlying debt on the loan isn't baseball related.

They're trying to build a "pretty good" team. "Great" is not realistically on their radar. "Great" is only possible by accident. They've traded in their chance at "great" in exchange for "financial flexibility". I think that what the Mets are trying to do, in a nutshell, is to assemble the best team that they can with an embarrassingly meager, especially for New York, budget. While bullshitting everyone, still, that they have no economic constraints. As if Ben Zobrist is the cure-all for every single baseball problem that could possibly ail a team. The New York Mets Operate Like A Ponzi Scheme Mets ownership is taking team revenue and sending it to their creditors By Howard Megdal on Dec 21, 2015 at 5:06 PM It’s hard to overstate the opportunity the New York Mets currently enjoy. It’s no less hard to overstate the absurdity of how little they are doing to capitalize on it. The Mets own the rights to the finest young stable of starting pitchers in baseball. Further, thanks to the strange economics of baseball—under which a player earns little more than the league minimum for his first three years and then enters a controlled arbitration process that limits raises for three years after that—the Mets’ quartet of great young hurlers will never be less expensive than they are now. The four—Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz, plus homegrown closer Jeurys Familia—will make around $9.5 million next year. Considering how much it costs to buy pitching on the free agent market—the San Francisco Giants, for example, have a starting five that will cost $70,616,666 next season—this theoretically frees up the Mets to leverage their young, cost-controlled pitching with enough offense to dominate baseball for the foreseeable future. But that’s not how this is going down. Because the New York Mets’ owners, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, are drowning in debt. Back in 2008, the team’s investments with Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff were discovered to be a fraud. More than $500 million in assets Wilpon and Katz thought they had—and had borrowed against—vanished. Accordingly, just to stay afloat, they needed to take out a $430 million loan against the team and $450 million against their majority ownership stake in SNY (a network started with a loan from Madoff, incidentally). Ever since, the Mets have managed to get by annually by diverting revenue from their baseball and television operation into the financing of debt. Prior to the refinancing of the past two years, the annual interest on these two loans plus debt balloon payments of more than $43 million have exceeded team payroll itself. The refinancing of the two loans has extended their due dates out five years, so this arrangement is set to continue for a long time to come. And the debt balloon payments run until December 2045, when currently youthful pitching ace Steven Matz will be 54 years old. You can add in the settlement of the lawsuit brought by the trustee for the Bernie Madoff victims, Irving Picard. He sued Mets ownership, asserting they “knew or should have known” Madoff was a fraud. Ultimately, he settled with them once he determined that even if he won, Wilpon and Katz didn’t have the money to pay him. The settlement calls for payments in 2016 and 2017 that as of now come out to about $30 million each year. That such an arrangement is not in the best interests of baseball cannot be debated. Fred Wilpon, in what was his most recent press conference back in February 2013, happily acknowledged having diverted revenue toward both corporate and family debt. This is precisely what led MLB to strip Dodgers’ ownership from Frank McCourt, but then-Commissioner Bud Selig instead empowered Wilpon and even provided an MLB loan. Selig then looked the other way when Wilpon didn’t pay it back on time. Selig’s successor, Rob Manfred, has so far been unwilling to do anything about the arrangement either, noting recently that MLB teams ought to spend commensurate with their marketplace, but calling the fact that the Kansas City Royals have a higher payroll than the Mets a “fun fact.” Kansas City has a population one-fifteenth the size of New York City’s. Meanwhile, the very best offensive free agents on the market, like Jason Heyward, are headed elsewhere. Yoenis Cespedes, the team’s best offensive player during their magical late-season run to the World Series, has been described as too expensive by team officials. Second baseman Daniel Murphy, the team’s best hitter in the postseason, has also been deemed too expensive. Instead, the Mets filled their hole at second base by trading Jon Niese, who provided pitching depth, for Neil Walker. That deal allowed the Mets to add a second baseman at revenue-neutral prices. This off-season as a whole is a refutation of the public line by Wilpon and other senior officials that, should more revenue come to the Mets, they’d pass it on to consumers in the form of raising payroll. Per Forbes revenue estimates, the Mets were 27th out of 30 MLB teams in percentage of revenue spent on payroll last season. That was before the 2015 World Series run. And yet, while estimates of their postseason revenue alone range from $45-60 million and attendance increased by 19.6 percent, along with ratings on SNY having reached rough parity with the Yankees (meaning the network can charge more for advertising) there’s no sign that virtually any of this money is going back into the team. As of now, the team’s free agent moves—re-signing Jerry Blevins and Bartolo Colon to one-year deals, and adding Asdrubal Cabrera on a two-year deal—are largely paid for in 2016 payroll by the unexpected retirement of Michael Cuddyer. There’s no one to answer for this. Jeff Wilpon, team COO, hasn’t made himself available to a reporter since he was sued for sexually harassing a pregnant employee, Leigh Castergine, even though the suit has since been settled. Fred doesn’t talk on the record, either. The general manager, Sandy Alderson, is undergoing treatment for cancer. And the acting public face of the Mets, John Ricco, “doesn’t even know what the payroll is,” as one reporter familiar with the team put it. So the Mets have been blessed with a once in a generation baseball opportunity while being cursed by the ownership of Wilpon and Katz, multiple-time victims of Ponzi schemes. Given how the team’s finances currently work, it appears they’re now running a Ponzi scheme of their own. http://www.vocativ.com/news/262818/the-new-york-mets-operate-like-a-ponzi-scheme/

Shades of K-Rod.

How does a team guarantee playing time?

On the seventhday of Metsmas The Metsies sent to me: Seven pleas to please buy tickets Six Kirks a-hacking FIVE N-L FLAGS! Four front-line Aces Three wins 'gainst LA Two shortstop's broken ankles And some memories of Dillon Gee On the eighth day of Metsmas ....

batmagadanleadoff wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: It seems to me to be more a failure to be on the cutting edge or at least out in front of changing landscapes than it does some wicked conspiracy to try just hard enough to appear to be trying without actually trying This is the most brilliantly phrased thing you've ever written here (bold italicized). Concise, punchy and right to the point -- nailing that 25 year essence of Fred in just a few words.. Too bad you wrote it mainly to strike it down. Because the idea that they're only making token moves to appear to be interested but don't actually fool anyone is absurd. What, they just lucked into the various success, however brief, over the years? I'm sure Fred wants to win. He just doesn't know how even though he's been given enormous advantages over his competition. They're not token moves. They're half assed moves. Or as Breaking Bad's Mike would've said -- half measures. It's like needing a first baseman and going after Mo Vaughn, fat, grossly overweight and more than a year removed from his last swing in anger even though baseball's best first baseman -- Jason Giambi -- was also on the market. And if Giambi didn't want to play for the Mets because the atmosphere here had gotten so polluted over the years that many top tier free agents (and I don't know whether Giambi was one of those) had no interest in signing with the Mets, well whose fault was that?

Ceetar wrote: Ceetar wrote: It seems to me to be more a failure to be on the cutting edge or at least out in front of changing landscapes than it does some wicked conspiracy to try just hard enough to appear to be trying without actually trying This is the most brilliantly phrased thing you've ever written here (bold italicized). Concise, punchy and right to the point -- nailing that 25 year essence of Fred in just a few words.. Too bad you wrote it mainly to strike it down. Because the idea that they're only making token moves to appear to be interested but don't actually fool anyone is absurd. What, they just lucked into the various success, however brief, over the years? I'm sure Fred wants to win. He just doesn't know how even though he's been given enormous advantages over his competition. They're not token moves. They're half assed moves. Or as Breaking Bad's Mike would've said -- half measures.

Ceetar wrote: It seems to me to be more a failure to be on the cutting edge or at least out in front of changing landscapes than it does some wicked conspiracy to try just hard enough to appear to be trying without actually trying This is the most brilliantly phrased thing you've ever written here (bold italicized). Concise, punchy and right to the point -- nailing that 25 year essence of Fred in just a few words. Too bad you wrote it mainly to strike it down.

Jesse Hudson, he of the major league career that consisted of one inning pitched is the Met we were looking for. [fimg=444]http://paulsrandomstuff.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/jesse-hudson-1991.jpg?w=560[/fimg] Instead of plastering this post with Vida Blue pics you all already saw, I'll just post my favorite Vida mag cover, a Time Mag illustrated by bona fide Mad Man (Men) and top commercial artist of his generation, Bob Peak, and invite you all to venture down the internet rabbit hole to learn more about Mr. Peak. Thank you for playing. [fimg=555]http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1971/1101710823_400.jpg[/fimg] [fimg=333]https://simotron.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/apocalypse_now_united_artists_1979_bob_peak_art.jpg[/fimg]

Not much of a hint but Vida and the mystery Met are the only players from their high school to ever be drafted by a major league baseball team, let alone play in the bigs.

Still unsolved. I just looked up Stanton's stats. He hit 27 HR's for the first year Mariners. I don't remember that.

d'Kong76 wrote: If anyone gets this, they cheated. I dunno about that. The answer's kinda floating in here somewhere. Or rolling. It's down by ... ah, never mind.

cooby wrote: Good heavens, not Rusty? There's too much of an age difference for Louisiana Rusty and Blue to have been high school teammates. Staub was already in his 5th major league season when the A's drafted Blue out of High School. Besides, Rusty as a wide receiver?

It's not Seaver or Milner or McGraw. Blue hails from Louisiana, where he was also a star high school quarterback who received several college football offers. Blue's favorite high school wide receiver target was this same Met who is the answer to this quiz.

Mitigating Factors: 1. First 3 division titles were in the NL West. 2. Wilpons were co-owners during most of that time 3. There were 3 other teams in the NL East during that time 4. They did have 3 HOF pitchers and a HOF 3rd baseman. Fred Wilpon was the Mets de facto owner, if not the outright legal majority owner of the Mets in every single season that the Braves and Mets were in the same division. Besides, you're gonna mitigate why the Mets went 20 years between first place finishes when they had every single economic advantage a baseball team could possibly have? Fred Wilpon is much worse than simply a Madoff problem. He's the worst thing that ever happened to the Mets and his idiot son hasn't even fully taken over yet. More bad will come.

metsmarathon wrote: metsmarathon wrote: so, silly question. have they ever voted anybody into the hall based on their integrity, sportsmanship, or character? 100%? Of course not. I imagine it's made a difference (one way or the other) in a handful of otherwise borderline cases, though. I also imagine it's made a difference in the ultimate vote total of otherwise not-borderline cases, if that matters. well, that's basically my point though. setting aside the whole steroids question, has there really been a player who was not voted in for his playing record, first and foremost? Setting aside steroids, many, I would imagine. Bud Harrelson wasn't voted into the HOF because of his playing record. Dave Schneck, too. Probably. There are others.

The year's almost over and I've neglected to maintain my annual tradition of cramming a shitload of Vida Blue pictures into one post. Plus, Edgy can tell everybody how much he loves that '71 Vida Blue action shot SI cover from the peak of VidaMania. So here's a quickie quiz to get that post going. Which Met was a high school teammate of Vida Blue?

You know why the Braves were able to win so many consecutive division titles? I'll tell you why. Because Fred Wilpon is one pathetic owner and he'd continue to be pathetic even if him and his family never ever met Bernie Madoff. Believe me, that era of Braves dominance sez as much about the Mets as it does about the Braves.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: I didn't say you can't say what you said, I said it was bad form the way it was said. At which point some people got awfully defensive, and others copped to it. Who's talking about you?