New York Mets: Per Forbes, team’s value way below Wilpon’s selling price

Money is going out but not coming in

Thursday, Forbes magazine came out with its annual report on the value of baseball franchises. As expected the guys in the Bronx lead the way, as they have since 1998, this time they are up 9.0 percent to at an estimated value of $5B. For reference, that’s larger than the Gross National Product of The Bahamas. On the other hand, Wipon’s New York Mets came in at $2.4B, less than half that of their crosstown rivals.

Now comes the big rub. Any likelihood of the Amazins running out of the dugout at CitiField this season dwindles every day America is in lockdown mode over COVID-19. Aside from ticket sales, no parking, hot dogs, over-priced beer money gets collected, that entire revenue stream is gone.

Next, SNY, like all other national and regional sports networks have nothing to broadcast. Any advertising money from that source is mostly gone. While the country and world are at home binge-watching Netflix, people are losing their jobs and aren’t spending money on merchandise, no money there either. Finally, the national networks aren’t going to pay for non-existent games.

Just like every sports team in the world, there is little to no money coming in. However, the Mets have lots of money going out. One of the reasons why is the team carries so much debt as they are still making bond payments on CitiField. The Wilpons can’t afford to default on that.

Major League Baseball came to an agreement with the player’s union to pay $170M toward salaries over the next two months, which includes the Mets. Commissioner Rob Manfred also wanted teams to pay their full-time employees through the end of April at a minimum. For good measure, there is also the overhead of running a business, lights, telephones, computers, etc.