The potential sale of the New York Mets to Steve Cohen, a billionaire hedge fund manager, is all but dead, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said Thursday.
“My belief is there’s not going to be a transaction,” Manfred told reporters at an owners meeting in Orlando, Fla., though he held out hope that the deal could be resurrected. “My soothsaying isn’t great. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Cohen had been negotiating with the Wilpon family, which controls the Mets, since the middle of last year. The Mets and Cohen announced in December that they were negotiating a deal in which Cohen would become the team’s majority owner. He has owned a small share of the team since 2011.
Spokesmen for Cohen Private Ventures and Sterling Partners, the Wilpon family entity that owns the Mets, both declined to comment on Manfred’s remarks.
The two sides reached an impasse over an unusual provision of the deal that would let Fred Wilpon, the managing owner of the Mets, and his son Jeff, the team’s chief operating officer, remain in their roles for five years after the completion of the sale, according to two people who were familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. There was also a dispute over the schedule of payments Cohen would make.
Reacting to multiple reports that blamed the Wilpons for the negotiations failing, Manfred pushed back. “Based on conversations with the buyer and seller on an ongoing basis,” Manfred said, “the assertion that the transaction fell apart because of something that the Wilpons did is completely and utterly unfair.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
David Waldstein contributed reporting.