Forget NYC 2012 and the Mayor's obsession with the five-ringed circus of international corporate sponsorship and minor sports. Forget the Jersey Jets and their eight games a year for a cool billion on the West Side. Hell, forget the West Side.
The real news in Bloomberg-Doctoroff desperation deal in Queens is the rapidly rising stock of that National League baseball club known as the New York Metropolitans. This deal didn't just fall into the laps of the Wilpons and their partners; they planned their hand correctly. See, Fred Wilpon is what we like to refer to as old school New York real estate. It's a family business, built by Fred for his children, in the tradition of the other founding families of the Real Estate Board of New York. Despite his lack of baseball judgement over the years (Bobby Bonilla, Vince Coleman, Mo Vaughn) Wilpon knows real estate, he knows the permanent government of New York, and he knew that the big Jets giveaway was a longshot at best.
So he knew there was a great chance Bloomberg was could begging, backed off the plate by Shelly Silver like a Rookie League Bostonian by a Tom Seaver fastball. And now Wilpon has a sweet deal from the city for infrastructure and rent-free occupancy of a new stadium by 2009; his dream for Ebbetts Field north lives.
And he got a better deal than George Steinbrenner, to go along with a team and a manager that is on the way up - by fits and starts, yeah - just as surely as his ancient, overpaid Yankees are on the way down. Steinbrenner is already packing Yankee Stadium and is footing the bill for a nearly identical stadium next door for a few more luxury boxes. Wilpon is launching a new network, getting a new stadium to go with his new team, in an entirely revamped corner of Queens - a corner within a shuttle bus of two major airports, a long subway ride from midtown or a quick SUV jaunt from Nassau and Westchester. In the final analysis, the Wilpon deal is better because the Mets stock has more room to climb in value - in the biggest media market in the world.
One word for the Wilpons: upside.
There's a reason why master builder Robert Moses brought his only two big international projects to Flushing - location and ease of construction. In New York, Moses knew that Queens was the right spot for the World's Fair. Imagine Willets Point (on the water, after all) freed of the auto body shops and warehouses, with a hotel, offices, restaurants, and parking - next to a shining retractable-roofed ballpark.
No one has been tougher on the dead Jets Stadium deal than Mike Lupica over at the News - and no one more spot on, either. Today, Lupica gets off some vicious parting shots. To wit:
Sometimes you don't even have to buy a ticket to win the lottery. Sometimes all you have to do is be standing on the right street corner, on Roosevelt Avenue, Queens, N.Y., in this case, and here come some of the phoniest politicians in the history of New York City to start throwing money at you.
That is what happened over the past four days to the Wilpons, who own the Mets. They have had a plan to build a new ballpark for the Mets for years, hoping that they would get the chance to do that before Shea Stadium, the biggest dump in all of pro sports, fell down on top of them. As responsible tenants, they had been telling Mayor Michael Bloomberg that over the next 30 years, it would cost the city of New York welll over $300 million for repairs to Shea, capital improvements, and general maintenance.
"Only because the place is falling down," Jeffrey Wilpon, the chief operating officer of the Mets, said last night.
Bloomberg acted as if they weren't even in town.
The Mets couldn't even get near the front of the line for a new ballpark. Bloomberg, over the past couple of years, had become the mayor of the Hudson Railyards, the 13 acres on the West Side of Manhattan that Bloomberg wanted to give away to the Jets.
And that's just the beginning. Do yourself a favor and read the whole column, a Lupica classic. And then imagine the value of the New York Mets franchise in 2009, when a new stadium opens in Queens, and the Mets invoke their team option on aging but still-stellar ace Pedro Martinez, well over 3,000 strikeouts, pitching for a perennial contender, and owning much of the baseball-speaking population of Nueva York.
