There is no such category listed in the authoritative Elias Book of Baseball Records, though I haven’t received the 2012 edition. But I doubt that it has been added: largest single-season payroll reduction.
Yet in writing about the New York Mets’ poor financial condition, reporters have pronounced the team’s payroll reduction, which they have estimated at about $50 million, to be the biggest in baseball history.
There are several problems with that claim:
The trustee for the swindled victims of Bernie Madoff listened. It reminded me of the time in 1975 when baseball’s club owners didn’t listen and it cost them in a monumental, historic way.
Irving Picard, the trustee, presumably felt his case against the Mets’ owners, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, at one point for $1 billion, was strong enough to argue before a jury and have the jury decide whether Wilpon and Katz were “willfully blind” to the money they were making from Madoff’s fraudulent Ponzi scheme.
But in a court session March 5 before Judge Jed Rakoff of United States District Court in Manhattan, Picard’s lawyers heard the judge express skepticism about the strength of their case.
A reader whom I have known for years as an astute long-time baseball fan approached me the other day with a question. “Why is the Times going after the Mets?” Ron Dworkis asked, meaning The New York Times. “They hammer and hammer and hammer them. They have a story one day and another the next day and another the next day, and they all say the same thing.”
I told him there was a simple answer to his question but he would have to wait to read it in this column. I can’t say his question prompted me to write this column, but it reinforced the idea that I should write it. I was already thinking about it because I had my own questions about the different ways the New York newspapers were covering the legal/financial confrontation between the Mets and the trustee for the victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
