The Wilpon family uses the New Yorker magazine to try to sell the minority stake in the Mets it has been peddling:
he didn't anticipate that owning the Mets would boost his seemingly unrelated business interests. "No one had heard of us before we bought the Mets, and afterward the change was dramatic," Wilpon told me. "I don't think someone has not returned one of my telephone calls in thirty years. It's a small club, owning a baseball team, and people want to be near it." As Katz told me, "You take the chairman of the board of a bank, with his grandson, on the field to meet David Wright, and make that grandfather a hero, and you do business the way we do business, it opens up everything."
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in 2002, they bought out Doubleday's half, in a transaction that put the value [of the entire team] at $391 million. Today, as Wilpon negotiates with possible investors, he says it's clear that the team is worth more than a billion dollars.