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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

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c85d33323ba2829d31ce90a876caea45

Outbreak in Europe May Revive Stalled U.S. Effort to Tighten Rules on Food Safety

Food-safety advocates hope the federal government will act soon to ban the sale of ground beef if it contains any of six dangerous strains of E. coli that have increasingly been found to cause illness in the United States — a step that regulators have been considering for at least four years in the face of stiff industry opposition.

The outbreak in Europe could also bring more scrutiny of the produce industry. Investigators believe the outbreak was caused by contaminated vegetables, but they have not been able determine which type. So far, the authorities say, more than 1,700 people have been sickened, including 6 Americans, and at least 18 people have died.

For now, the focus in this country is on beef, since E. coli lives in the guts of cows.

In January, the United States Department of Agriculture drafted a much-anticipated proposal to regulate six forms of toxic E. coli in meat, in addition to the most common form, O157:H7, which is already regulated. But the proposal has been stalled at the federal Office of Management and Budget, which typically reviews proposed regulations, and officials could not say when it would be made public.

The details of the proposal have been kept secret until a final version is settled on, but there is wide expectation in the food industry and among food-safety advocates that it would either ban the sale of ground beef containing those strains or call for testing and other controls. Advocates for the rules fear that the White House, which had a representative at O.M.B. meetings on the issue, was seeking to dilute the measure or even kill it. But they say that the catastrophic European outbreak could now force the government’s hand.

“The horrific illnesses that are happening in Germany will make government and industry here have to pay attention,” said Bill Marler, a Seattle lawyer who specializes in food safety and who has petitioned the Agriculture Department to ban the pathogens from meat.

The form of E. coli in the European outbreak is not on the list made by the Agriculture Department because that strain has never been identified as a cause of illness in the United States. But food-safety experts said that because of its virulence, officials would almost certainly have to consider adding it at some point. David Goldman, an assistant U.S.D.A. administrator, said at a news conference on Friday said that he could not comment on the proposed rule.

“There are indeed a lot of complicated technical issues as well as many stakeholders,” he said. “We all intend to get this right.”

For many, the outbreak in Europe evokes memories of a 1993 outbreak in the United States that first brought toxic E. coli bacteria to widespread public attention. In that outbreak, four children died and hundreds became sick after eating hamburgers contaminated with the O157:H7 strain that were served at Jack in the Box restaurants.

David M. Theno, a food safety consultant who worked with Jack in the Box to help it respond to the 1993 outbreak, predicted that the German outbreak would force the U.S.D.A. to take action against a broader group of bacteria. “You can’t just ignore them and hope it doesn’t happen here,” Dr. Theno said.

In 1994, the Agriculture Department declared the sale of ground beef containing the O157 strain illegal, and the industry began establishing measures to keep it out of meat sold to the public. Since then, there have been numerous outbreaks and millions of pounds of ground beef have been recalled. The bacteria has also caused outbreaks tied to vegetables, including spinach and lettuce. Produce can become contaminated from exposure to cow manure in the fields or the water supply or during processing.

Over the years, other toxic strains of E. coli began to get the attention of public health officials. They eventually identified six that most frequently caused illness, and federal officials began studying whether the sale of meat containing these strains should also be banned.

As part of that effort, the Agriculture Department last fall issued standards for tests to rapidly screen food for the six strains.

Gardiner Harris contributed reporting from Washington.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d4f533985cbb6fa2d0fb19b42fe8c915

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

Outbreak in Europe May Revive Stalled U.S. Effort to Tighten Rules on Food Safety

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