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Meet the New Mets Minority Owners?

After Madoff settlement, the team is all set for the season

by
Marc Tracy
March 20, 2012
Keith and Jerry, reunited.(Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)
Keith and Jerry, reunited.(Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)

Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, owners of the New York Mets, settled a lawsuit brought by the trustee in the Bernard Madoff bankrupty for $162 million (Joe Nocera has an excellent column explaining why the settlement is fair and in fact could result in Wilpon and Katz losing far less than that amount).

For baseball fans, the important thing here is that the settlement let Wilpon and Katz hold onto the Mets by stabilizing their finances in the wake of their selling nearly half the team. Specifically: they reportedly sold 12 shares of the team, each representing four percent, for $20 million a pop. One of the shares was reportedly bought by the hedge-funder Steven A. Cohen; only four others were purchased by people or groups who don’t already own the team. Which is to say that I am really, really hoping the culture’s most famous Mets fan and apologist now owns four percent of the Mets.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.