What is it about the desire to own a baseball team that turns grown men, wealthy men into harebrained wackos?

Fred Wilpon announces that he may sell 20 percent to 25 percent of the Mets, and they can’t go public fast enough to declare their interest in buying what Wilpon is selling. Some of them go further, proclaiming their intention, or at least their desire, to buy more than Wilpon is selling.

But does Wilpon himself know how much of the team he is selling?

“This is how Hicks started with the Rangers: ‘I want to sell 10 percent,’ then 20 percent, then 30,” said an investment banker, referring to debt-laden Tom Hicks, who sold all of the Texas Rangers last year.

Hicks is not someone Wilpon would like to be compared to or someone he would like to have to emulate. Hicks was an embarrassment as an owner and not much more impressive in his sale of the team.

During his ordeal, Hicks said a lot of things that turned out to be more smoke than fire. He spent himself into an impossible financial situation, deliberately defaulting on $525 million in loan in a strategy he thought would force his creditors into meeting with him to make terms of the payback of the loans more palatable to him.

Wilpon has debt, reportedly $400 million of it, but he continues to say he and the Mets have no financial problems and will have none. Wilpon has always had a better reputation than Hicks, but some of his comments regarding his Madoff episode have raised an eyebrow or two.

So does something he was quoted as saying the other day – that he had not told Commissioner Bud Selig, before his announcement last Friday, that he was going to announce his intention to sell as much as 25 percent of the Mets.

I think the absence of notification is as likely as the Mets’ winning the World Series next Fall. Wilpon and Selig have long been friends, very close friends, and they talk frequently on the telephone, perhaps close to every day. Selig talks to owners on the phone all day long, and if you checked a log of his calls, you would find far more calls to and from Wilpon than any other owner.

Wilpon not let Selig know he was about to announce he was putting a piece of the Mets up for sale? No chance.

So does Wilpon’s saying he did not notify Selig undermine his credibility? We’ll have to think about that.

Selig met with Wilpon in New York Tuesday. The commissioner and his wife, Sue, were in the city to attend a luncheon that they gave at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

A baseball official said the commissioner is concerned about Wilpon but doesn’t know enough about the issues he faces to reach any conclusions. “He needs more information, a lot more,” the official said. “It’s stunning. We’re digging into it.”

In the meantime, prospective buyers line up to buy a piece of the Mets. Those who are loudest in line are viewed as having no chance to attain what they are yapping about.

“Anyone who’s out there publicly isn’t a real player,” said one of three people I spoke with who have been involved in the sale of professional teams. All of them spoke on the condition that they not be identified because their comments could be bad for business.

I asked all of them if they had ever had a buyer who had publicly declared his intention to buy the team.

“That’s a great question,” one of them said. “The answer is typically not but it doesn’t always mean that they are truly publicity seekers. Often they are like the vodka guy with two girls in bikinis. Usually they don’t get the team. Usually the serious people keep quiet.”

Said another: “It’s very rare that the guys who hold the press conferences wind up making the buy. A lot of people find that it’s a great opportunity to get free publicity. The ones who close are the ones you never hear about.”

Reporters are willing accomplices in the publicity seekers’ game. The New York Post offered a glaring example of that relationship last week. The day after Wilpon made his announcement, the Post ran a story saying that Martin Luther King III headed a group that wanted to buy the Mets.

A day or two later King said not so fast. A friend had called him and asked if he would be interested in being part of a group, and he said he would explore it. He said in no way was he the head of the group, and it was even premature to say he was interested in being part of the group.

Larry Meli, a cable television executive, apparently was the source of the King story and he went full bore with his group’s interest. He said his group wanted to buy “at least 50 percent” of the Mets even though Wilpon had said he was looking to sell 20 to 25 percent.

But Meli didn’t stop there. “We have more than sufficient resources to buy the whole team if we had the opportunity,” Meli said.

Yet another member of the group, Ed Kranepool, a former Mets’ first baseman, said count him in. “I’d be crazy not to seek this opportunity,” he said. “We have the people. I’m not too concerned about the finances.”

Martin Silver, who owns a vodka company, didn’t just answer a question or tell a reporter of his interest; he expressed it in a news conference the day after Wilpon’s announcement.

“Silver is a distributor of this, that and everything and it was an easy way to get publicity,” said one of the team brokers. “A lot of people like to talk and see their name in the newspaper. I see it all the time and roll my eyes. Andy Murstein is mentioned in every story and never gets the team.”

Murstein heads a financial investment company.

“You never know if they have the money because they don’t get the team,” one of the brokers said. “These are the guys who wind up getting quoted. They’re not in the deal. They want to get the publicity.”

But not all outspoken would-be buyers are not in it just for the publicity. Some actually make bids. In 2005 a Broadway entrepreneur, Rocco Landesman, who owned and operated five theaters, headed a group that was trying to buy the Cincinnati Reds.

He and his partners were “all over the papers,” one person recalled, until a friend with baseball connections called him and told him that wasn’t the way to go about buying a team.

Bob Castellini beat him out, but he made it a lot closer than it otherwise might have been. Instead of buying the Reds, Landesman became chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Wilpon fights for his future and his reputation. “This whole Mets thing is a mess,” one of the brokers said.