Kiners Korner Chronicles No. 12: The New Owner Takes His Seat

Welcome back to the Kiners Korner Chronicles — the real ones. In our premiere, we brought back Tom Seaver's homecoming. This time we rewind to the very beginning of the rescued run: the earliest episode we have, rescued from May 4, 1980.

And the guest isn't a ballplayer. Between games of a Sunday doubleheader at Shea, Ralph's guest was the new president of the New York Mets — Fred Wilpon, three months into owning the ballclub, sitting in the chair where the players usually sat, taking Ralph's questions about what kind of team this was going to be.

The Game — Sunday, May 4, 1980

Sunday, May 4, 1980. A doubleheader at Shea against the San Diego Padres — and a franchise three months into a total reboot. On January 24, Doubleday & Co. had bought the Mets from the Payson family for $21.1 million, a record price for a baseball team. Doubleday held 95 percent; Fred Wilpon held 5 percent and the title of club president. In February, Wilpon hired Frank Cashen — the architect of the Baltimore Orioles' dynasty — to run the baseball side. Joe Torre was managing a young, thin roster, and the customers were restless.

Game 1 teased them one more time. The Mets jumped John Curtis for three runs in the first inning — José Cardenal singled home Frank Taveras (aided by an error in right), John Stearns doubled home Cardenal, and Alex Treviño singled home Jerry Morales. Three-nothing, before the crowd had settled in. It was all they got. Kevin Kobel couldn't hold it: Aurelio Rodríguez's two-run homer cut it to 3–2 in the second, and Gene Tenace tied it with an RBI single in the third, chasing Kobel. Tom Hausman then threw 4⅔ hitless innings of relief — and the game was still lost on his watch, because in the eighth, Dave Winfield singled off Jeff Reardon and Gene Richards came all the way around when the ball got away in right. An unearned run. Padres 4, Mets 3.

Somewhere in the middle of that long afternoon, Winfield collected the 1,000th hit of his career — a milestone day for the Padres' star in his final season in San Diego. And when Game 1 ended, with a second game still to play, the show went on — and Ralph's guest was the owner. The Mets went out and won the nightcap, 6–2, behind Ed Glynn, with Neil Allen closing it; the split left them 7–14. But the day's real news was what Wilpon said between the games.

The Show

Start with the mood. The Mets had just blown a 3–0 lead, and Wilpon doesn't sulk about it: it's a long season, you can't go by each and every ballgame, the kids are trying real hard — the hitting just isn't timely at the moment. Then Ralph gets to what the fans want to know. The new operation arrived too late for the winter's free-agent market — so what happens when the re-entry draft comes around? Wilpon says the goal is a contending ballclub, and ownership will do everything necessary; the first two steps were re-signing Craig Swan and Joel Youngblood, and when players become available, “we'll be right there.”

On trades, he's blunt about the arithmetic. Everybody asks why they don't just go get a Dave Winfield — but to get a good ballplayer, you have to give up a good ballplayer, and this club will not deal away young players who haven't come into their own yet. “We don't want to trade away our future.” That's Frank Cashen's doctrine, and Wilpon describes how Cashen is working: at the park early, at the park late, assessing every bit of talent in the organization, on the field and off it — because this ownership doesn't believe you walk in and start firing people before you know what you have.

Ralph points around the ballpark — new seats going in, the restrooms back in working order, the clubhouses finished, the press room brought up to date — and Wilpon lights up. The players should know they're with a first-class organization, he says, treated no better or worse in first place than in last, as long as they're hustling. Ownership can't go out there and pitch and hit; what it can do is make Shea a place people want to come to. “That's our goal — to make it fun to come out to Shea Stadium.” Some 25,000 fans were in the park that day, and he's proud of it.

Then Ralph takes him back to Brooklyn. Fred Wilpon was the pitcher, and Sandy Koufax was the first baseman, on the same Lafayette High School baseball team as well as the Basketball team— and Ralph wants to talk about Sandy's hands.

Wilpon had just spent two days with Koufax in Florida — Vero Beach, then a visit to Wilpon's place — and he marvels all over again: the biggest hands you ever saw, more slender than Gil Hodges's but larger, fingers longer than Ralph's own, on a man who'd slimmed down from 215 pounds to about 185. The wives hit it off; old friends pick up like no time has passed. Ralph, naturally, wants to know if he talked him into making a comeback for the Mets. Wilpon laughs that off — and admits his own sporting day had already gone sideways: he'd lost two of three sets of tennis that morning. “It's not a good day,” he sighs. “I lost the game, I lost at tennis.”

There's a charming detour in there — tickets, sold right at Shea, for the Tournament of Champions starting the next day at Forest Hills, where Wilpon played league tennis on the same West Side Tennis Club courts where Budge and the old greats played. The new owner of the Mets is, at heart, a fan. You can hear it in every answer.

After the break, Ralph asks how the deal itself came together — $21 million and change — and Wilpon tells it like a steal of home: a long, hard acquisition conducted in total quiet. Other groups were out front claiming they had it all locked up. The Doubleday group stayed “very much in the background,” deliberately — publicity wasn't going to help them get the team — and didn't surface until the next to last day. And the $21 million was just the entry fee: the purchase was presented with the additional money the club would need over the next four or five years built in, the company capitalized so they'd be “prepared to spend what is necessary.”

What strikes you, listening now, is how determinedly hands-off he is. The Doubleday people know baseball as fans — bring up DiMaggio or Ted Williams and they'll talk all day — but they also know what they don't know, and the professional side belongs to the professionals. Wilpon talks with Cashen nearly every day, but if a decision has to be made on a player, it's Frank's decision. The staff is being rebuilt around them, too — young Jay Horwitz among the recent hires. And the timetable? Ralph asks about five-year plans, and Wilpon waves it off: “I don't have any five-year plan — but the sooner the better.” The magic, he says, is back — not the magic of a winning team yet; that's not the point. The magic is back is the magic of baseball in New York.

That's the show: a quarter-hour with a new owner, three months in, telling Mets fans exactly what he intended to build and how he intended to build it — spend the money, keep the kids, hire baseball men and let them work. Mets fans had waited a long time to hear an owner talk like that. “Let's go back to the ballpark,” Ralph says — and off they went to Game 2.

Next in the rescued series, we jump a decade to July 1, 1990, and a guest unlike any other in this chair: umpire Eric Gregg. And here's the footnote that ties the whole series together — check the box score below. The third-base umpire for Game 1 that Sunday afternoon at Shea? Eric Gregg. Join us Monday. And if you're sitting on a tape of this show — any tape, any year — the hunt is still on, and we want to hear from you.

Down on the Korner — the book Howie and I wrote about this show and these Mets — is available here.

Watch the rescued episodes as we revisit them: the Kiner's Korner archive playlist.

Box score: Game 1, May 4, 1980. Source: Baseball-Reference / Retrosheet.