Fred Wilpon was going to fly to Chicago to apologize to the Mets in person, but after talking to Terry Collins and other team officials about what made the most sense, he chose to avoid a possible media scrum and apologize via speaker phone to Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and the Mets, who took the call in the Wrigley Field clubhouse. According to the Daily News he called David Wright separately, as he is not with the team at the moment due to his injury.
So I guess our short regional nightmare is over.
Or not, because according to Mike Vaccaro in the Post, Wilpon needs to apologize to fans too. Which I find kind of confusing because I’m not sure what injury his comments in the New Yorker caused them. Were they under some Wilpon-fueled delusion that the Mets were championship contenders? And that this delusion was firmly in place until the moment the evil Wilpon let his guard down and revealed that -- no! -- the team was, in fact, “shitty?” Is that the betrayal for which Wilpon needs to apologize?
Seems like a stretch. Most Mets fans I know are more than familiar with the state of the team. And while they wish that Wilpon’s comments didn’t happen due to the distraction they have caused, I don’t get the sense that their substance represents an insult, the kind of which the angry season ticket holder Vaccaro quotes complains of. If you bought what Wilpon has been selling for the past couple of years that’s your own fault bub. Anyone with a lick of sense knows that the team has been a mess for a while. The people who were actually harmed here were Beltran, Reyes and Wright, it seems.
Back to them: I did find one thing that Jose Reyes had to say rather amusing: “he’s the boss and he can say what he wants to say.” That’s right out of the Derek Jeter play book back when George Steinbrenner was running the show in the Bronx. That little quote usually ended any Big Stein-inspired flap and, over time, diminished the significance of any given incident.
So, the lesson: if you want to sound off on your team, make a habit of it so that everyone can get into a good serve-and-volley rhythm, thereby defusing the story.