Mr. Met and a Coca-Cola polar bear stood on the podium above the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, silent stars in an entourage celebrating Coke’s new deal to replace Pepsi as the official soft-drink sponsor at Citi Field. As a Coke executive pressed the button that triggered the bell, Mr. Met clapped his four-fingered hands together, and the Polar Bear pumped his left front paw in triumph.
Everyone else clinked and sipped from special Coke bottles commemorating the New York Mets’ National League pennant.
The deal was in the works at least a month before the late July turnaround that propelled the Mets from second-place mediocrity to the World Series, a strategy that indicates that Coke was focused more on signing a 16th MLB team whose stadium it can inundate with its sodas, water and iced tea than on associating with a winner.
“We don’t buy wins or losses,” said John Cordova, Coca-Cola Group’s director of sports management. “We’re their partner, no matter what.” Still, the more the Mets win, the more Diet Coke and Dasani will be sold at the ballpark.
And, it’s fair to say, Coca-Cola will be happy every time Howie Rose or Gary Cohen refers to the new name of the Pepsi Porch in right field.
The stock exchange was Coca-Cola’s court. Companies whose stocks are listed on the exchange can ask to ring the bell to announce a milestone or some news. But there are exceptions: In early 2006, several Mets rang the bell as part of their winter caravan. On Friday, Aflac Inc. celebrated its 60th anniversary there, with a real duck, its corporate icon, in tow.
For the Mets, showing up at the exchange can be viewed as a small sign of recovery after a half-dozen years as a corporate zombie, the team’s financial underpinnings savaged by Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. But playing co-star to Coca-Cola is also a reminder that the state of the Mets’ finances is not fully known, which is true of nearly every team in sports.
They are private enterprises, but they regularly receive public benefits like the tax-free bonds that helped finance Citi Field’s construction. The Mets are as opaque about their profits and losses as the publicly owned Green Bay Packers are transparent about theirs. But because of the Mets’ financial woes, more is known about them than they would like: that the Wilpons needed short-term loans and private investment to pay their bills for a while and that they have refinanced the debt on the team and their television network, SNY, to reduce their interest payments and to delay the full repayment of their nine-figure loans. About all that is known publicly about the Mets’ finances is a yearly report they must file about the revenues behind their annual stadium bond payments of about $44 million.
And no outsider knows how much, if at all, the Wilpons have dipped into their real estate wealth to enhance their team’s finances.
Not knowing how far along their financial recovery is makes it difficult to know how much the Wilpons will spend to sustain last season’s momentum. They need to replace the power they acquired in the half-season rental of Yoenis Cespedes and the hitting of Daniel Murphy if he signs elsewhere. The multiteam battle for four years of the versatile Ben Zobrist’s services will force whoever signs him to overpay drastically. And how many of their young and quite wonderful pitchers will the Mets keep as the pitchers eventually approach free agency?
But the Mets made fans a promise of sorts in the words of Sandy Alderson, the general manager. Back in 2014, he first stated that the Mets would increase their spending when revenue increased from attendance at home games. From the start, that vow sounded absurd, as if he were daring fans to come to Citi Field to watch a bad team so he could raise the money to field a good one. Fans needed to be lured; Alderson grasped the concept last July, realizing that Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard would not alone drive heavy traffic to Citi Field. So he acquired Cespedes and other players, pushing the player payroll over $100 million.
Fans responded. Attendance for the season rose nearly 20 percent over 2014, to an average of 31,725 a game.
It is likely that attendance will rise again in 2016; teams that play in the World Series usually draw more fans the next season. After the stock exchange bell-ringing, Lou DePaoli, the Mets’ chief revenue officer, said: “The success of the team has driven more interest. There’s been some interest in ticket sales, but it’s still early. We just went on sale to the general public last Monday.”
He told Newsday last month that the team had sold 8,500 new quarter-, half- and full-season ticket plans, 2,000 since the World Series. He did not update that figure on Monday.
So will the Mets, no longer a zombie, stand by Alderson’s vow to spend more on players if fans spent more on tickets as they are doing?
“We anticipate more flexibility,” John Ricco, the Mets’ assistant general manager, said Monday at baseball’s winter meetings in Nashville. “I think that dynamic has started to occur and will continue to occur, from what I understand.”
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