There were two big stories to come out of the Mets ownership department yesterday. First, the Mets settled on Picard case with a 162 million settlement. Second, the Mets completed selling minority shares of the team, totaling 240 million. The News is that the Mets have already committed the Money to the MLB and Bank of America to pay back their loans.
That leaves only one major financial case ahead of the Mets, to see if the Owners will be compensated for Madoff, thus negating the 162 million in the settlement.
Those are the facts, but they leave a lot of room for speculation. On one side is Mike Francesca, who sees a brighter future of the Mets because he envisions a Mets team now where the owners can commingle assets with the Mets franchise to start spending money again. The thought here would be that the Mets were not doing this because they didn’t know what accounts were toxic.
Bob Klapisch disagrees. He asserts that there is no guarantee that the Wilpons will put the money inside of the team.
And honestly this is where the problem for the future of team lies. Up until this point, the question was whether the Wilpons would have to sell the team, and that hampered the Mets on field moves. Now the question is, since the Wilpons will be able to own the team for a while, will they actually invest in the team? Will they keep the team in standstill as it is now or try to push it forward.
It is no secret that the Wilpons want the team to start bringing in more money before additional heavy investment, but they aren’t going to get the income without bringing something to the team, especially with the division as it is now.
I can’t commit myself to saying the team is better off now or not, because I don’t know. Hopefully we’ll see a different approach to the offseason before the 2013 season, which will put a lot of these conversations to rest.
