Harry Frazee 'em

Like our Peerless Leader, I have to be traveling this weekend—and NO, it does NOT have anything to do with arranging fully equipped and furnished shelter sites for leading government officials should anything go wrong at the Singapore Summit. Nope, nada, I completely deny it!—so I leave you with these thoughts, you lucky dogs.

In a horrible irony, probably the two best pitchers now belonging to a sinking team are...Legroom and Cinderella. That's right: Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard.

Two pitchers the Mets will never, ever trade to us, because it will be embarrassing if they're pitching in the World Series every year for the Yankees and because, well, they're the Mets, and their entire purpose in life is to slowly torture their fans without ever truly rebuilding.

Besides, as many have remarked on this site, other teams are not simply going to hand us major talent for our old junk, just because we'd like them to be so obliging. There's absolutely no way that the Mets give us their best two pitchers for anything except a price we would find to be prohibitive, and probably not even then.

Unless...

Let's not forget, this magical odyssey we call the New York Yankees all began when we managed to acquire Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox for...not even junk, but straight cash, to finance Sox owner Harry Frazee's investments in "the show business"—which, incidentally, dwarfed professional baseball at the time. The rest of the Red Sox soon followed.

Like Frazee, Mets owners Wilpon Pere and Wilpon Fils are mostly interested in something entirely outside the realm of baseball. That is, real estate development. Of late, they have been somewhat thwarted in that, as a judge recently threw out their master plan to develop Willetts Point because, go no, in the State of New York you're not allowed to simply sell off public land to developers without an act of the legislature.

So...what our own ruling family needs to do is shell out enough cash to the legislature to make Wilpons Point a reality—judging by our Albany solons' usual standards, a couple hundred dollars and some lottery tickets should do the trick—OR, secure another, undeveloped piece of property somewhere in New York, and agree to hand it over for Legroom and Cinderella.

Now sure, back in the days when men were men and women rolled their eyes even more than they do today, a man like Harry Frazee could plough his own enterprise straight into the ground and nobody would say boo. Today there would be a big investigation or some such, and much harrumphing from the commissioner.

Fine. Put a nice gloss on it with a few "prospects." Have the Mets announce that they can't wait to get our latest draft fiasco, uh, choice, Anthony "One-Man Band" Seigler, so that he can play every position on the field simultaneously and ambidextrously.

It doesn't matter. As long as there is real estate underneath it all, the Wilpons will bite.