Wherefore art thou Nelly D?
Down in St. Lonesome, it’s a day off for both the big league and minor leaguers but for the Skill Sets it’s far from an off day in fact it’s day one of the most important fortnight of their lives as the Madoff trustees claw back suit finally makes its way to court with jury collection and optimistically, opening arguments.
There has been some speculation that there could be a settlement reached today with the thinking being maybe both sides knowing that they are dealing with a floor amount of $83 mil and a ceiling of $386 mil but if you’re Irv Piccard and the Madoff victims the thought has to go through your mind “will I ever see any money from the Wilpon’s”?
Do the Skill Sets have $83 mil? I have no idea, I do know they don’t have the funds to assemble a decent bench for their baseball team or enough funds to fortify the depth of their starting pitching, so if I had to guess $83 mil might as well be $83 billion.
I’m with the majority of Mets fans who would rejoice if the Skill Sets were to sell, but the one caveat I throw out there before I donate a bunch of cardboard boxes for the Freddy, Uncle Saul and Jeffy to pack their bags and get out of Flushing is, who is going to buy the team?
If you tell me there is some big fancy Wall Street mogul or one of the Titians of industry that will follow the Nelson Doubleday way of running the team which is to let the baseball operations people run the show and make sure the bartenders have a heavy pour, well then I’m all in.
If you tell me that another member of the lucky sperm club or a guy with money who loves to see his name in the paper and feels he’s a “baseball guy” and wants to run the team his or her way, then maybe keeping the Skill Sets isn’t as bad as it seems. I mean as bad as Jeffy Skill Sets is, he’s not worse than David Samson is he?
See anger over ownership is the same as anger over a manager when the team is going bad, everyone screams fire the manager but when you ask “ok but who is the replacement”, you get crickets.
See if you are going to dump a manager or in this case an owner, you have to have a better replacement ready to take over.
I am certainly no fan of the Wilpon’s, their meddling (Jeffy in particular) in how the team is run is the reason the club is in the mess it’s in right now. They’ve always worried more about winning the back pages of the tabloids in December and January than building a solid foundation to keep the team in contention for years to come. But again is it better to have the Skill Sets as owners or James Dolan? The devil you know is sometimes better than the devil you don’t know.
