NY Mets attempts to partner with Yahoo for a ridiculous subscription-based website -- fail ensues
The Mets have been vying for the title of "Most Inept Sports Organization", but haven't been able to pass up the Knicks -- at least not yet.
The Mets' downfall started with a seemingly minor transaction. Following the 2013 season, an executive had an irrational personal dislike for utility man Justin Turner. This was despite the fact that Turner could play multiple positions and performed decently offensively. The team had control of Turner and could pay him the Major League minimum, but.... they released him. Then that same executive put the word around baseball that Turner didn't hustle and was bad in the clubhouse -- both of which weren't true. He just wanted ruin Turner's career on the way out the door.
For a few months, the odd revenge plan worked. Turner, who was only a bench guy, was considered toxic, and nobody would touch him. Then Tim Wallach saw Turner hitting at a Cal State Fullerton alumni game, and thought he looked great. Wallach, then a coach with the Dodgers, asked Turner why no team was interested in him, and Turner said he didn't know. Wallach suggested to the Dodgers that they sign him, so they grabbed Turner for the minimum. You know what happened after that.
Think the Mets could have used Justin Turner over the past 6 seasons?
Other gaffes followed, and the Mets currently sit with the second worst record in the NL.
Despite their recent MLB irrelevance, the Mets felt that they could somehow make money from a subscription-based website covering them. They looked at the model of The Athletic, an all-sports-encompassing collection of well known journalists, which is ad-free but charges a subscription fee.
Somehow the Mets didn't understand that the public's yearning for coverage of a fail baseball team wasn't going to be the same as their yearning for quality coverage of all sports.
Conceived in February as the Queens Baseball Club, Yahoo felt that they had a big thing on their hands. They would pay a paltry $1 million to the Mets for rights to the coverage, and this would be their first subscription-based site covering an individual team. If the Mets experiment worked, they would expand this to other interested baseball teams, eventually hoping to catch all 30.
The whole thing was full of fail from the start.
People detested the idea of paying to read coverage of just the Mets.
People accused the Mets of ripping away free coverage and known reporters for the team, in exchange for almost no benefit to the team (as $1 million is pocket change to an organization like the Mets).
Nobody was particularly interested to pay for a website covering a mediocre team.
Laughably, even the name was a fail. There was apparently a different Queens Baseball Club in existence, and Yahoo failed to secure the rights to the name. They sheepishly changed the name to Flushing Meadows Baseball Club (not nearly as catchy), and targeted opening day as the starting date.
It never happened. Various other fails occurred along the way, and the website never launched. Finally, today Yahoo admitted this simply wasn't going to happen, and they shuttered the project.
Here's an article about it in the NY Post: https://nypost.com/2019/07/23/yahoos...as-ever-alive/
Yahoo's statement was as follows:
Quote:
We’ve realized that there are opportunities which have the ability to scale faster and give fans what they want quicker. We’ve learned a ton during this exploration and intend to use these insights to inform the future of the fan experience through Yahoo Sports.
In other words, the project is totally dead. Note that they didn't announce any pending deals with other teams. It seems they're giving up on the entire stupid idea.
The Mets refused to comment.
What an embarrassment.
:fail2
