Earlier this week the $2.6 billion sale of the Mets, seemingly agreed upon between sellers, Fred and Jeff Wilpon, and buyer, billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, fell apart. Cohen walked away, the Wilpons waved him goodbye and that, it would appear, was that.
The reasons for the deal breaking down are still a bit murky, but today the New York Post reported that it was a matter of control: specifically, who controlled the team as the official “Control Person” — a legal term under Major League Baseball’s constitution — for the next five years.
Original reports of the deal said the Wilpons would retain control for five years at which point Cohen would take over. According to the Post, though, this came as a surprise to Cohen, who thought he’d have more say than that:
When he realized Wilpon was going to really be in control for five years while Cohen owned a majority of the team’s equity, Cohen got uncomfortable with the deal and worked at changing the terms.
“Steve thought he would be controlling the shots. He would be the power behind the throne. Baseball balked at that,” a source said.
He either did not understand what he signed in the term sheet, or thought that once he had the deal he could significantly alter the terms, a source said.
A source close to Cohen disputes that it was clear that the Wilpons would be in charge for five years. The source says that, in reality, the parties intended to work out a more fluid transference of team governance than that, under which Cohen would assume power over time. The Wilpons, however, insisted on the idea that being the “Control Person” for five years meant that they would have full control for five years. Cohen then tried to change the payout terms of the deal — reportedly switching from a gradual buy-in over time, or perhaps reducing the total amount as opposed to an up-front $2.6 billion payment, but the Wilpons balked.
The report suggests that the Wilpons had Major League Baseball’s backing in their interpretation of the term sheet, as the league does not recognize multiple Control Person[s] or what have you, but that strikes me as a bit off.
The Giants, for example, are owned by a large group. The team has a board, basically, and it elects their Control Person. That person has changed at least twice, going from Peter Magowan to Bill Neukom to Larry Baer to Charles Johnson, all without a sale of the team. Major decisions are, likewise, handled via votes of the many owners, even if proxies are given to Johnson or whoever the Control Person is at any time. Similarly, the Cubs are owned by the Ricketts family, which administers the team via a board (i.e. the family all voting on stuff), even if Tom Ricketts is the official Control Person in the eyes of MLB.
Which is to say that the Wilpons could’ve agree to a different structure along the lines of the Giants and Cubs or along any other lines they could think of without running afoul of the “one Control Person” rule. It just seems that they didn’t want to. They wanted to have their $2.6 billion cake and to eat it too. Which seems rather unreasonable to me. Doesn’t that seem unreasonable to you?
But it gets worse: apparently the Mets, possibly with the backing of MLB, are seeking to have Cohen blackballed from purchasing any other team. From the Post:
Nevertheless, the Mets and MLB believe Cohen acted in bad faith and that, coupled with his record as a controversial hedge fund manager who was suspended from managing outside money, he may not get the support from owners to buy a team again.
“It would be in question,” a source close to the owners said.
I’m not going to lay down much to defend Cohen, who has a somewhat checkered business history, but the idea that Major League Baseball would blackball him because he backed out of the deal after what sounded like an insane demand on the part of the Wlipons is kind of nuts. On the one side you have a multi-billionaire who wants nothing more to purchase what should be one of your league’s marquee franchises and, in the process, increase the value of the 29 other franchises by virtue of that big, big sale price. On the other side you have the Wilpons, who have repeatedly mismanaged said would-be marquee franchise and clearly want out, but not before making unhinged demands that would rightfully put off any other buyers who might come down the pike. And the league sides with the latter over the former? Really?
I don’t know what magical powers the Wilpons have over Major League Baseball, but they are formidable.
In January, Major League Baseball issued a report on the Astros’ sign-stealing effort that refereed to the scheme as “entirely player-driven.” It claimed that, besides Alex Cora, no non-player staff had involvement in the now-infamous banging scheme.
According to the Wall Street Journal, that is not true.
Jared Diamond reports that now-fired Houston GM Jeff Luhnow was presented with a program called “Codebreaker” in 2016 that would be used to decode the opposing catcher’s signs during games. Per the Journal, the program was used by the team’s baseball ops and video room staff to decode signs and give that information to hitters in real time. The program was put to use both at home and on the road. The revelations directly contradict the notions from Rob Manfred’s official report that the Houston front office was not involved in cheating, that the players initiated the cheating, and that the strong suggestion that the Astros were free of sin when they were playing away from Minute Maid Park.
Luhnow claimed in a statement after his firing that he is “not a cheater” and that he “did not know that rules were being broken.” Yet he was reportedly enthusiastic about Codebreaker (sometimes referred to internally as the “dark arts”) and would walk into the video room during road games to ask about Codebreaker. Luhnow denies that to The Journal, yet it is hard to take him at his word at this point.
The report includes some more juicy details about the Codebreaker program and Luhnow’s levels of involvement, but the more important ramifications seem to be about the fact that none of this information was made public before.
The Journal states that the league’s evidence included knowledge of the existence of Codebreaker, yet the league’s report completely omits it and exonerates Astros non-uniformed personnel. The league’s report also somewhat pointedly omits any mention of actions prior to 2017, even though Manfred apparently knew about the Codebreaker implementation and that program’s 2016 origins.
Why?
Why did MLB not punish any personnel besides Lunhow? The intern who reportedly originally presented Codebreaker to Lunhow, Derek Vigoa, is now Houston’s senior director of team operations. For that matter, why has nothing become of Kevin Goldstein, who according to a report from Jeff Passan asked his scouts to point their cameras into other teams’ dugouts? That information became public before the conclusion of the league’s investigation. Is the front office-driven nature of the scheme the reason that AJ Hinch never put a stop to the banging?
Beyond that, what happened in 2018 when the use of Codebreaker stopped? Was it because there was a better system implemented, and was there front office-driven cheating in 2019? Tom Verducci point-blank asked Hinch whether there was truth to the rumors that the Astros used buzzers to convey signs during the interview that aired tonight on MLB Network. Hinch stated that the league found that no buzzers were used (h/t to Brendan Kuty for transcribing the full exchange). That’s not exactly a “no.”
It’s also worth noting that the Journal states that the aforementioned euphemism “dark arts” was used in the Advance Scouting Department’s 2019 budgeting spreadsheet. Is that a reference to the initiative Goldstein proposed, a new sign-stealing scheme, or something else entirely?
A lot of things about this whole story never added up. Why didn’t Hinch ever flat-out tell the players to cut it out? Why didn’t they get the message when he went as far as to smash the monitors, and did so twice? How could Luhnow – and owner Jim Crane, for that matter – not know about any of this?
The picture is becoming clearer now. We still need more information, and the question of Crane’s knowledge of these matters is still not satisfyingly resolved. But for some reason, MLB decided to conceal this side of the story, and decided to leave everything that happened before 2017 out of the report. Baseball deliberately shielded everyone in the Astros’ front office besides Jeff Luhnow.
Rob Manfred needs to tell us why.
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February 07, 2020 at 12:43PM
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