The new Madoff-Wilpon judge makes the Mets’ prospects look a whole lot brighter

I missed this in all of the McCourt crap last week -- I really do only have so much brain space for legal/financial baseball news -- but the case against the Wilpons and Saul Katz was moved from bankruptcy court into regular old court court, which was what Wilpon and Katz had wanted.

And better yet, the judge handling it all, The Hon. Jed Rakoff, said a number of things from the bench suggesting -- and it’s only suggesting -- that he may view the Wilpons’ duty to inquire into whether Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme to be far less encompassing than the bankruptcy trustee, Irving Picard, has suggested.

Today there is a profile on the new judge in the New York Times -- a maverick of sorts -- that may hold even more good news for the Mets:

“I can’t guarantee this, of course, but my tendency is to try to get quick decisions,” he said during a hearing last week in which he evinced, at least for the purposes of the legal argument before him, a fair amount of sympathy toward the team’s owners, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz ... He suggested that in accusing the owners of being “willfully blind” to the possibility that Madoff was a fraud during their many years of investing with him, the trustee might be holding them to an unfair standard.

Quick and favorable? Boy howdy, would that change things for the Mets, wouldn’t it?