Ownership put us in a position where for 4-5 years (longer if you include the collapses, but that wasn't their fault) we were the punchline of MLB.
Yeah, but it's like if you have an alcoholic uncle whose wife leaves him and he lives in his car, and you say, "hey, come on Uncle Dave, get your shit together!" And then he starts going to programs, and he gets a job and starts dating an awesome woman, and then you put up a billboard that says "MY UNCLE DAVE IS AN ASSHOLE DRUNK! LOL!"
The timing doesn't make any sense to me.
And you seem to be sensitive about those jokes and that attitude, but I think the jokes were deserved, and usually funny.
I'm not sensitive to jokes. Jokes are funny.
I'm sensitive to knee-jerk meathead stupidity. Sometimes it's in the form of jokes. Usually, when it's in the form of jokes, it comes off as "HURR DURR! LOOK AT ME! I HAVE A POPULAR BUT NOT VERY INFORMED OPINION!"
You're one of the few people I've encountered that seems to defend the Wilpons (post-Madoff) entirely.
I don't defend them at all, I think they're entitled dickheads with a tin ear for PR. Actually I can't stand them.
But WFAN callers piss me off more than the Wilpons do. If we handed over the team to the type of mouthbreather who put this billboard up, the Mets would probably be looking at 50 wins this season.
It's like Hobson's choice.
If Marlins fans put up a sign saying the same thing about Loria I would have no problem with it either. I'm not going to say, "But you have Stanton! How can you complain?" They're supposed to be decent this year. That doesn't mean that guy isn't a bad owner.
But, the Mets are actually doing what they should have done 7-8 years ago to put a competitive team on the field every year. The Marlins are doing their usual shell game with absolutely no intention of using their team as anything but an alternative to a Cayman Islands tax shelter. The Mets' failures come from trying to win, and being bad at it, and they hired a team of guys to fix it. The Marlins' failures are basically intentional (any winning they accomplish is a side effect).
So a billboard against Jeffrey Loria would be accurate. I'm not against the concept of billboards; I'm against stupid self-flagellating idiocy that sometimes appears on billboards.
The Eeyore shit will mostly go away when they start to win. But there's a reason the Eeyore shit developed.
There's two main reasons:
(1) the people who cover sports in New York are mostly morons;
(2) the Mets were bad for a long time, because of the type terrible decisions they are determined not to make anymore.
There's no way to control (1), but why kick the Mets in the balls when they're trying and succeeding to fix (2)?