Sports of The Times: Madoff Had Everything to Do With Reyes’s Leaving

But the formerly dear friend of Mets ownership has left his soiled fingerprints on the departure of Jose Reyes. The Mets never really contended for Reyes. They sat back and let it happen, acting like a small-market franchise, rubbing their hands together in penurious fashion and saying, what will be will be.

And they had a point. Deep into the age of free agency, the Mets’ management made a baseball decision. It is hard to separate the cold lack of money from the cold judgment that Reyes could fall apart at any moment. The Marlins are feeling giddy from their new (if dubiously financed) stadium, and are building a team that at least talks like a contender.

The Mets are not building. The Mets are hunkering down. Alderson, the team’s general manager, referred to a loss of $70 million last year as the reason the Mets could not compete with the six-year, $106 million contract Reyes is apparently about to sign in Miami.

Madoff had nothing to do with that? One reason the Mets are losing money is that they made bad decisions about talent and had a string of injuries at the same time they began pinching pennies. The cockamamie dimensions at their three-year-old playpen upset their power hitters, and they began losing games and fans in the same death spiral.

But it is intellectually dishonest to suggest that the incarcerated Uncle Bernie has nothing to do with all this failure and loss. Madoff robbed the guts and heart of a franchise. I will never believe that Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz consciously defrauded loved ones and friends, but nothing is the same with this team. The fans know that, and are staying away. Tickets are going for pennies on the Web, and that is Bernie Madoff’s doing.

The Mets are currently rejiggering their outfield dimensions, which does not particularly affect Reyes, but they cannot easily rebuild their future. For all they know, Reyes could twang a hamstring hopping up on the stage at his welcome-to-Miami news conference. Not on the Mets’ watch, and not on their closely grasped dime.

For the record, Reyes has not played a full season since 2008. He is vulnerable to leg injuries, which is not a good thing for a player who makes a living with his legs. Yes, mea culpa, when Reyes was on his way to a batting championship with a .337 average late last season, I took the sentimental stand that the Mets needed to re-sign him.

To be fair to myself, I was factoring in the impending infusion of cash from a sugar-daddy partner named David Einhorn who somehow never arrived in Queens. Somebody knew something, but I am not sure what.

At any rate, I overlooked the cold hard logic of my friend Al Campanis when he was general manager of the Dodgers. In 1982 I asked Campanis how he could let Steve Garvey go to the Padres, and he said: “I love Garv. We’d love to have him back at first base for a few years. But not at the price he wants.” That is as applicable today as it was in 1982. And the Dodgers in those blessedly pre-McCourt days were more solvent than the Mets in the Madoff plague years.

Also, take a look at Reyes’s downside: he turns 29 in June, and has played 295 games in the past three seasons. The Mets could not afford him, in any sense.

This departure has nothing to do with Reyes’s vanishing act on the final day of the season, when he bunted for a hit on his first at-bat and immediately scrammed, daring Ryan Braun of Milwaukee to get a bunch of hits to capture the batting title, which Braun did not.

Reyes’s departure was cheesy. Manager Terry Collins more or less said so (in nicer words) after the game. It was the judgment of a nice guy who does not always think things through. But Reyes is essentially a good person who wants to please people, including himself. His smile has lighted up the Mets’ franchise since he arrived in 2003, the season he turned 20. But he would not have carried the Mets out of these hard times, and management could not afford him. Simple as that.

Other franchises are facing wrenching losses — Prince Fielder from Milwaukee, maybe even Albert Pujols from St. Louis, although Pujols needs to know that he will never have a better forum than his potential status as 1A with Stan the Man himself. Reyes has to know that in the vast metropolis of New York he was never going to win five World Series the way Derek Jeter has done.

The worst thing about Reyes’s departure is that Mets’ fans cannot harbor much sentimentality for long. When Reyes pokes his handsome face out of the Marlins’ dugout on the evening of April 24, the Mets fans will give him a huge cheer, and he will respond with one of those smiles that can light up the night.

But Reyes will be playing in the same division as the Mets. The Marlins are on the upswing, or so they think. The Mets were a contender once upon a time. But that was before Uncle Bernie plunged them into the depression that we all need to acknowledge.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

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