What Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon can do to make up for this offseason

How can the New York Mets owners ever make up with the fans after years of torture and an offseason where it looked like they were on the way out?

Being a New York Mets fan can sometimes feel like being in a relationship with a person with a narcissistic personality disorder.

For the unaware, narcissistic personality disorder is a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others. While it isn’t intentional, after all, it is a DSM-5 classified disorder in which the patient is unaware of how their actions affect those they interact with, it still can lead to a lot of hurt especially for those who have to deal with the patient.

Hence the narcissistic personality disorder. The Wilpon family, namely Fred and Jeff Wilpon is obsessed with the back pages. They think that they can run the Mets when in actuality they’re basically James Dolan if he was cash strapped.

Jeff Wilpon, the very definition of a trust fund baby who’s mooching off his daddy’s gains, and who has never worked a day in his life sees the Mets as his passion project. He’s basically Olivia Jade Giannouli, Hunter Biden, Eric Trump, and Fredo Corleone rolled into one unappealing package, both an embarrassment to the Wilpon family as a whole, and someone who, outside of running the Mets into the ground, has contributed nothing of note or value.

And yet while he seems to think he is doing the right thing, he fails to realize that he’d be better off being hands-off.

Who suffers as a result of Wilpon mismanagement? The fans. The ones who pay to see a good product on the field in the nation’s largest media market. The ones who are forced to watch as homegrown stars are never given serious offers or any offer at all, and depart for riches elsewhere.

Under any normal circumstance, because of the years of mismanagement and the events of this offseason, fans would say the Wilpons are past forgiving, however, to play devil’s advocate, I decided to hold my nose and wade into the filth.

Is there any way the Wilpons can exit on a high note, or are they completely too far to forgive? Let’s take a look.

Rebuild when necessary

The word “Rebuild” has a dirty connotation in sports. In baseball, rebuilding teams are viewed with disdain, suffer in attendance, and star players stuck on rebuilding teams generally sour to their environment quickly and desire to escape.

Whereas the Mets were essentially forced to rebuild from 2011-2013 because of Fred’s inability to see Bernie Madoff as the thief that he was, in recent years, the Mets seem to have taken a half-baked approach. When considering Sandy Alderson’s replacement and the two finalists were Chaim Bloom and Brodie Van Wagenen, Wilpon chose Van Wagenen because he believed he could win with the team that was presently constructed, along with some improvements.

Bloom, on the other hand, felt a rebuild was completely necessary, and as we saw from the Mookie Betts trade, he is not afraid to make unpopular decisions.

As long as Wilpon ownership is in place, they seem to operate under the assumption that rebuilds are completely impossible in New York. This in spite of the fact that it was only four years ago that the Yankees committed to a soft rebuild and ended up getting future franchise cornerstone Gleyber Torres in exchange for two months of Aroldis Chapman. Part of the problem is that Wilpon is unwilling to commit the resources to a core rebuild.

When the Mets traded away their aging and soon to be expensive 2015 and 2016 core players at the 2017 and 2018 trade deadlines (Lucas Duda, Curtis Granderson, Neil Walker, Addison Reed, Asdrubal Cabrera, Jeurys Familia), the returns were as follows: minor league relief pitcher Drew Smith, minor league relief pitcher Jacob Rhame, minor league relief pitchers Gerson Bautista, Stephen Nogosek and Jamie Callahan, minor league reliever Eric Hanhold, minor league reliever Franklyn Kilome, minor league reliever Bobby Wahl and minor league third baseman Will Toffey. If you weren’t excited by any of those names, nobody would blame you.

The reason why the returns were so minimal was because of Wilpon’s refusal to throw money in the deal to offset contract costs. As a result instead of getting a core that could get the Mets over the top in the short run, they settled for low upside lottery tickets that have for the most part served as AAAA depth at best.

Even if a rebuild is unpalatable, half-baking it does more harm in the short and the long term. Should the Mets struggle this year, if a team offers an attractive package for a player provided the money is kicked in, Wilpon should stop looking at the bottom line and think long term.

Extend the core

In the past decade, Mets ownership has notably extended four of their players: David Wright, Jon Niese, Juan Lagares, and Jacob deGrom. In their defense, only deGrom’s deal has worked out so far thanks to a second consecutive Cy Young and the fact that he signed at a relative bargain compared to his free agent contemporaries.

That being said, fans have understandably been frustrated seeing franchise icons leave the organization, especially for rival teams. Whether it be Jose Reyes to Miami in 2012, Daniel Murphy to Washington in 2016, or Zack Wheeler to Philadelphia in 2020, it always seems like these moves are made explicitly to spite their former club.

Wheeler especially called out the Mets, saying they were “a poorly run organization” and that he “heard crickets”, which GM Brodie Van Wagenen responded by referring to Wheeler’s new mega-contract being the result of “two good half-seasons”.

Regardless of who was right in this, ownership’s lack of drive to get extensions done means fans who get to know and love certain players are inevitably left disappointed when they leave.

Baseball is a business, of course, but with the next wave of players destined to test the free agency waters will hurt the team if they leave. Michael Conforto may be a passable defender in the outfield, but he is an All-Star caliber player who provides solid protection for Pete Alonso.

Noah Syndergaard may have been inconsistent the past couple years, but he is still a great pitcher capable of going deep into games with one of the league’s highest velocity fastballs. Steven Matz and Marcus Stroman represent quality back of the rotation arms for the Mets that would likely be higher in any other team’s rotation.

With the Wilpons unwilling to break the luxury tax threshold and coming very close to it, extensions seem less likely unless cash can be moved around. That being said, the only major commitments are deGrom and Cano. At the very least, starting a dialogue with someone like Michael Conforto, who has shown that he can handle New York and seems to enjoy being there, is at the very least a starting point.

Scale back Jeff’s Influence

The best-run teams are the ones where ownership does not grab headlines. Unfortunately, Jeff Wilpon, despite not making many public appearances in recent years, has made enough headlines with his actions than with his words.

Criticisms of the way the organization has been run since the Wilpons took over have largely been placed on Jeff Wilpon. In fact, critics and baseball insiders have said he was the most meddlesome executive in baseball, short of former Marlins president David Samson.

His detractors have said that Wilpon runs the team like he is the general manager, that everyone responsible for baseball operations is strictly there to take the heat off of him. With the public perception that Wilpon is an outsider who thinks he is a great baseball mind despite his very limited experience and lack of expertise, it’s no wonder his siblings and relatives want nothing to do with him and want the team sold.

Obviously, as chief operating officer, he is in charge of the daily operations of the team, but his father and his uncle are the Chief Executive Officer and President of the team. As we saw, the deal to sell the team to Steve Cohen fell apart over Jeff Wilpon’s inability to understand the concept of relinquishing ownership, and as a result, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz have to be embarrassed by his actions.

Jeff may be an adult, but the truth of the matter is that he bleeds into areas of the team’s operations that he really should not, and if all it takes is for Fred and Saul to establish boundaries that limit Jeff’s meddlesomeness, at least until the anticipated sale of the team does go through, then fans will greatly appreciate the move.

Considering Jeff was able to purchase an eSports team in the Overwatch League in 2017, and considering how surprisingly successful the New York Excelsior has been under his watch, it’s hard to believe that he can’t keep busy and stay meddlesome if his father and uncle were to hypothetically scale back his role with the team.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel for long-suffering Mets fans though. The Wilpons are planning on selling the team, and it would seem like the day a sale is finally announced will come sooner than fans think.

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Until then, fans can hope and dream that in their swan song, the Wilpons will do the right thing, and run the Mets in a dignified manner.