Did the Mets Spend to Win?
I read and hear many empty excuses for the Mets’ current financial problems and their inability to spend enough money to field a competitive team in 2012. Toward that end, I’d like to share two comments posted to MetsBlog on Sunday.
First, from “Hodges14”
… I never hear the Yankees owners complaining that they lost $70M in a season so they can’t put a competitive team on the field for years to come. Since George Steinbrenner bought the team in the early 70s he always understood that if you make winning the priority you will sell tickets and the business can sustain itself.
Second, in reply to this comment, from “4everMets“:
You hit the nail right on the head!!!! The Wilpons are NOT interested in winning!!! Imho, they only want to be good enough to sell tix and play meaningful games in Sept. Nobody has talked about how if the Wilpons were making ALL this money through Madoff how they STILL would not spend enough to get the Mets over the top instead settling for the B or C free agent instead of spending on the sure thing. This is where they wind up wasting their money.
Please post your reaction to these thoughts in the comments.
I’m not on the same page as some here but find it pretty lame to “excuse” the ownership’s bad fiscal decision making. It is not quite the same thing to blaming Sandy Alderson for having limited discretion given what he has to work with. Blame the messenger, if you want, of course.
Still, I don’t know what “competitive team” means. To me, it is not the same thing as pushing the team “over the top” to playoff level ball. The former is more middling, especially given the talent out there at the moment. The team was “competitive” until August.
Tampa w/o a Boston collapse had little chance of getting to the playoffs, but was quite “competitive” even w/o that collapse. The Mets were competitive in this sense of the word in games far pass May.
And, given ups and downs of MLB baseball PLUS the extra wild card, the idea the Mets would have no reasonable shot at the playoffs for “years to come” is not something I buy either. I don’t know that as to ’13 and ’14.
The argument is absurd. If the Mets decided that the Yankee model is the way to go, then you have to do exactly what the Mets are doing. The Yankees built from within, with young players like Jeter, Rivera, Posada and Williams, and then used free agency to supplement that VERY strong core. When the Yankees tried to buy a championship, they failed miserably – just like the Mets. The Yankees have leveraged their great teams to generate a ton of revenue to sustain that success (by paying those stars as they got older), but their success is due to player development.
Wilpon has shown that he is willing to spend the money when it is helpful. Signing guys like Bay and KRod made things worse.
The “Core” only became the core because of all the Great player the Yanks put around them.
Steinbrenner&Co. ran a very middling show until George was suspended and Gene Michael changed the organization’s philosophy. The younger Steinbrenner has not messed it up (except for the ridiculous resigning of ARod to an ungodly sum).
Also, the Steinbrenner’s don’t bear the financial burden alone—they have partners. I don’t know how much influence these partners have, but their presence might help soften any economic hardships.
Since the ouster of Doubleday the Wilpons (and Katz) have owned the whole shebang. In down times they feel a greater burden.
Another difference is that the younger Steinbrenner son seems a lot sharper than the young Jeffy Wilpon.
One could argue that the Wilpons main priority has been ownership, while the Steinbrenner group wants to win just as much owning the team. In other words, the Wilpons would like to win but are not as driven to achieve it as the Steinbrenners.
This goes on for so long as the players are under contract. Come and see us, they say…root for us…wear our jersey and show us the love, they say.
Then comes contract negotiation time and all of a sudden, the fan love and devotion that every team and every great player has promoted for all those years goes right out the window in favor of the “it’s just business” excuse. It’s just business that Reyes signed with the Marlins and dissed his fans for a few million more; it’s just business that the Mets didn’t try to sign him to a larger contract; it’s just business that Pujols left St. Louis, the only place he’s ever known…where fans have treated him like a god among men…for the sake of tens of millions of dollars more than the hundreds of millions of dollars that he would have made had he stayed; it’s just business that St. Louis didn’t show him more love by paying him a few million more per year.
The fans are asked to become emotionally invested in every great player that a team develops…then those same fans are asked to just sit helplessly by while everyone ignores the emotional investment and just factors in the money…because that’s what the game is all about today…the money. But that’s not what’s they say it’s all about when they’re getting us to buy the tickets and the caps and the jerseys and the pictures…its about the love.
So what can I conclude about this game today? It’s a sham. It’s a fraud on all of the millions of fans who have been induced to fall in love with their favorite players on their favorite team, hoping that they’ll stay together for the lifetime of that player’s career…only to be told at the height of that career that it’s just business when that player bolts for another higher-paying team.
How does this fit into this discuss? Does anyone believe after the events of the last week that any of these teams give two shakes of a lambs tail about what the fans think? Does anyone think that they care at all about the time and money that each fan has emotionally invested in the team? Does anyone think that anyone factors any of that into their “negotiations” and deliberations? I don’t think so. And where winning comes into that equation? That’s open for debate. I’d argue that the emotional investment is there because the fan wants to see his team win. If the owner is unwilling to spend money on the favorite player, he’s ignoring the fans emotions and by the same token doesn’t care about winning…because it’s just business.
I’m thinking long and hard over this offseason as to whether I’m a pro baseball fan anymore. I can’t invest that kind of emotion and love in a team and its players if they’re just going to let the players go like it doesn’t matter to us…because it does. And maybe they’ll never recognize that…and maybe I’m just naive. But I thought baseball was supposed to be more than just about the money.
The irony is that Bud Selig — through the new CBA — is applying all sorts of changes to the game that ultimately make it more similar to NBA and NFL in terms of promotion, in that the focus will be on the individual / superstar player. Because hey, that’s what “the studies” say is effective marketing of pro sports. Go figure.
I will miss Jose, but I miss winning more, and I wouldn’t sacrifice the latter for the former.
That you can’t win with a roster full of overpaid players is just fair competition, it seems to me. Teams that spend smarter than us deserve to beat us. Especially — especially! — when we spend more than them.
Think on your hatred for the Yankees, and you will know this to be true.
I do think that most owners really want to win, and often that desire to win leads them to stupid decisions. Take for example the Rangers signing A-Rod to a contract that sank the team. The signings by the Marlins and the Angels may accomplish the same thing. So not only are the fans subject to this emotion, but the owners are, too – they are sure that this time they’re really buying a World Series. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way.
So here’s a question. Give the Wilpons and Alderson the benefit of the doubt. If they really think that the actual competitive value of Reyes justifies only a shorter, lower-value contract than the Marlins think, would you rather they pursue a path that in the judgement of the baseball people gives them the best opportunity to win games over the next 6 years, or would you rather they had signed Reyes for 6/$120 million and live with the consequences in terms of just hoping to be .500?
There’s really good precedent for this: think about the Red Sox letting Johnny Damon, perhaps their most beloved player (by the fans), go to their most hated rival. Yet Epstein’s moves lead to them winning World Series again without him, and maybe the decision to let him go was the correct one. (The same can be said for trading Nomar in 2004, by the way.)
Overall, I think the “business” and the “baseball” decisions are more completely intertwines than your description. At some point, if you want your team to win, they are the same: you want management to evaluate correctly the true value of the player, and not to exceed that no matter what Scott Boras says. Unfortunately, the Mets have made some bad decisions – mostly by signing average or above-average players for star money, and neglecting to build the farm system – and maybe now they’re going to correct that.
Then I’d give my baseball people an amount of money in the upper range of that scale. “Here’s more money than the Braves have. If we can be almost as smart as them, we should be just as good as them, right?”
When my employees failed to win titles with my ample money, I’d replace those employees.
This seems like what the Wilpons have tried to do. They just haven’t been smart enough and ruthless enough to replace the right employees at the right times. Wishing for them to choose more wisely is totally reasonable. Wishing for them to spend more is asking them to be irrational.
Put it this way:
If you saw an employee wasting your money, would you respond by giving them more money to waste?
“Mr. Jeff Wilpon has decided that he’s going to learn how to run a baseball team and take over at the end of the year,” Doubleday told the newspaper. “Run for the hills, boys. I think probably all those baseball people will bail.”
Jeff has made and signed off on all the big decisions (and many small ones) for the past 10 years. He’s executed personnel changes based on his personal baseball “acumen” and the trusted advice of lunatics such as Tony Bernazard. That said I sincerely hope you are not intimating that the Wilpons are merely cursed with the bad luck of not knowing how to choose good front office people — they’re incompetent owners who can’t help themselves from playing with the team as if it were a toy or hobby. Not unlike George Steinbrenner, except that George was hell-bent on excellence and winning, while the Wilpons simply are enthralled with the idea of being sports moguls.
Further, I didn’t intend to blame this all on Minaya. Whoever was the team’s CFO probably did more harm to the organization than any GM could. That was a truly incompetent selection. (Though, to be honest, I have hated Minaya ever since the second I read about the Ring/Bell/Owens/Lindstrom for Nothing trades.)
As for Wilpon interference, I have no idea who to believe. Every word spoken on record says they have no more input than any other team’s owners. Every whisper to the contrary might either be the real truth or reporters making stuff up to grab eyeballs. Given the New York media coverage, I would be stunned if ownership was never accused of meddling, regardless of whether or not they actually did. Years of Steinbrenner proved it’s a juicy topic. In fact, I think the Meddling Wilpon storyline increased 10,000% post-George.
So I’m just going by the payroll numbers. To me, those look like a well above average attempt to put dollars behind the desire for victories.