Notes, quotes and comment

I don't often hang around for FSN's post-game stuff, but the promised sight Tuesday night of Ron Gardenhire playing goalie after the Wild game was too good to resist.

Not to say that Darby Hendrickson and Terry Steinbach were firing NHL-quality shots at Gardy, but he seems pretty good with the glove hand, which I suppose one should expect of a former major league infielder, even when in his 50s.

But a goalie has to be better on skates than Gardy. A lot better.

Todd Richards, the Wild coach, returned to the ice to take in Gardy's style:

"You get to see a good goalie (Nikolas Backstrom, who had a shutout for the Wild) and you get to see a bad goalie (Gardenhire)."

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I've written the past two days about the Mets/Madoff connection and the implications for the franchise ownership. The New York Times reports the Wall Street con artist was heavily entwined with the baseball team's finances, and a good chuck of Bernie Madoff's clientele came to him though the recommendations of the Wilpons.

This is going to get uglier, I think.

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Rob Neyer left ESPN this week to join SB Nation. Because of that, I've added the SB Nation baseball home page to my siderail under "other baseball links."

Neyer was, for me, the biggest attraction to the ESPN baseball page; I expect my visits there to dwindle. And while I find SB Nation as a whole uneven -- so much of it is unappealing or even sophomoric that I've shied away from most of their blogs in the past -- they've made some intriguing hires of late on the baseball side, Neyer being the most prominent.

Mets sale rumor followup

Turns out Martin Luther King III isn't "leading" any group hoping to purchase the Mets. He may (or may not) be part of the group (which may or may not made a bid, and if it does, may or may not be accepted), but he's not the big dog pulling the sled.

Which makes sense. Limited general partnerships in baseball ownership appear to work when (a) they involve large market teams, which makes it relatively easy for investors to move in and out (as with the Yankees and (b) when the big dog also has the biggest chuck of capital involved.

This is part of why the famous Bill Veeck never owned a team for long. He didn't have the money to buy a team outright; he was always the managing partner in a limited general partnership, and the people who did have the money generally wanted the money back after a few years. (There were other factors too -- health, family issues, and a general preference on Veeck's part to chase the next deal rather than build.)

The main point with the Mets right now isn't so much who is looking to buy into the team, but whether the Wilpons' ownership of the Mets can survive the squeeze of the python that is the Madoff scandal. My guess-- purely a guess -- is that a full sale is inevitable, just as I believe the McCourt divorce is going to force that bickering couple to sell the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Matters of high finance

Fred and Jeff Wilson's offer: Invest in our team and shut up.

It's been known for quite a while that the Wilpon family, the owners of the new York Mets had "invested" with Bernie Madoff, once a highly regarded figure on Wall Street and now an imprisoned con man. The Wilpons had withdrawn the money long ago.

Now they are about to be hit with a "clawback" suit from the special trustee, whose job it is to recover whatever funds can be salvaged from the mess and distribute it proportionally among Madoff's victims. How much money is involved is unclear, but it could be as much as $1 billion. It's substantial enough that the Wilpons are offering 25 percent of the team for sale.

Selling a minority interest is likely to prove difficult. There have been expressions of interest, but they pretty much all want control of the operation. Which figures; it's difficult to imagine that somebody with a spare $125 million or so to put into a baseball team would be inclined to let folks with the track record of the Wilpons bumble around with their capital.

Some of those expressing interest are known to have serious money. One, for example, is the founder of Vitaminwater, who sold that company to Coca-Cola for $4.1 billion. Others ... well, one group is headed by Martin Luther King III and includes Ed Kranepool, a Mets first baseman in the 1960s, and Donn Clendenon Jr., the son the the man who platooned with Kranepool on the 1969 Mets. I'm sure these guys have more cash than I do, but is being the son of a civil rights icon really so lucrative? I'll believe it when I see it.

So it's interesting times indeed; baseball is flush with cash, and it appears that two of its most high-profile franchises, the Mets and the Dodgers are approaching forced-sale status through the sloppiness of their ownerships.