A few months after moving to Austin, I walked into a Dollar Tree and found a stack of Will Leitch’s outstanding God Save the Fan, the only book to date (to my knowledge) that namedrops The Dugout. I was even more surprised when I turned the corner found the entire 40-man roster of the New York Mets standing in the aisle, crammed between the ghetto toilet papers and the Totally Awesome™ laundry detergent. I was gonna buy them, but I was like, “eh, it’s the Mets.”
It looks like I missed out on my chance to own a pro baseball team, because in three years hedge fund manager David Einhorn could gain control of the New York Mets for exactly one dollar. In real life.
Via Forbes:
Last month Einhorn and the owners of the MLB team, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, came to terms on a deal in which Einhorn would pay $200 million for a one-third stake in the Mets and would have the right to obtain a 60% interest in three years unless Wilpon and Katz returned the $200 million to Einhorn but allowed the hedge fund manager to retain his 33% ownership.
A banker familiar with the deal says the “strike price” for the 60% stake is just $1.
If the Mets are only a dollar, how much are the Nationals? I think we should pool together our resources and help Faith and Fear’s Jason Fry and Greg Prince buy the Metropolitans out from under this guy for, say, eight dollars and let them see what they could do with it. It couldn’t be any worse than what’s already going on, and it couldn’t be much worse than the Dodgers.
