Ed Kranepool and the NY Mets

QBC 2014 photo by http://www.centerfieldmaz.com/2014/01/the-first-queens-baseball-convention.html

This is what the Wilpons don't get. Embrace the Mets history. If everyone including former players are taking shots at you as owners, why wouldn't you think there is a problem going on? It's like Mr Burns cloned himself twice, bought the Mets, put his clones in charge and is oblivious to how people perceive them. "Smithers....I mean Jay. The Fans, the media, and our employees all love us right?"
Smithers  I mean Jay," Yes Sirs. They think you are the bees knees."
"Exxxxxcccceeeelllleeeennntttt."

 Jeff come on. Stop being petty because someone said they can run the team better then you and your dad. I got an idea. Why not step up to the challenge and run the ball club better? "Hey we bought the Syracuse Chiefs so the players don't have to travel all the way from Vegas when called up now!" Rumor has it you guys bought the Chiefs because you burnt all the bridges in  AAA and the only way you could get a team back east was to buy it. Purely rumors though.


From the NY TIMES.

According to Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ longtime spokesman, the trouble stems from a remark that Kranepool made perhaps five or six years ago to Jeff Wilpon, the Mets’ chief operating officer and the son of Fred Wilpon, the team’s principal owner.

The remark, Horwitz said, came during an annual team dinner and apparently occurred during the period when the Mets, under serious financial pressure because of their involvement in the Bernard Madoff fraudscheme, were looking to recruit investors to buy a minority stake in the club.

As Horwitz tells it, “Ed approached Jeff in front of a lot of people and said, ‘I hear you are selling shares in your team.”’

And then, according to Horwitz, Kranepool added: “I don’t want shares. I want to buy the whole team so I can run it better than you and your father.”’
Asked about that remark, Kranepool remembered the exchange somewhat differently. Kranepool’s name had emerged around that time in connection with a group that was expressing interest in buying the Mets outright. That effort didn’t go anywhere, but Kranepool said Wilpon had made a disparaging remark to him about it.
“One thing led to another, and we had some words,’’ Kranepool said.
The result has been disruption in a relationship that began when Kranepool, as a teenager out of James Monroe High School in the Bronx, briefly made it to the Mets in 1962, the team’s inaugural season. After that, he found a niche for himself, a 6-foot 3, left-handed hitter who never had more than 16 home runs in a season and who finished with a career average of .261.

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