Hedge fund manager’s baseball deal has died.
It looks like the closest David Einhorn is going to get to being a NY Met was on Halloween in 1975.
Back in May, the hedge fund manager said that he had agreed to purchase a minority stake in the team for around $200 million. He wouldn’t comment on deal specifics, but many speculated that there was some sort of pathway to majority ownership.
Now the deal is dead. Both the Mets and Einhorn issued separate statements this morning, basically blaming each other.
The team claims that “After months of negotiation, the parties were unable to reach agreement” — with a source telling the NY Daily News that Einhorn had “overplayed his hand.” For his part, Einhorn said that “the he extensive nature of changes that were proposed to me at the last minute has made a successful transaction impossible.”
What’s particularly odd about all this is that Einhorn had made the deal sound like it was signed and sealed during a May conference call, with delivery just awaiting Major League Baseball’s approval. Maybe he simply was trying to get ahead of a media leak while negotiations were still ongoing, or perhaps he’s telling the truth about the current owners effectively getting cold feet.
Either way, New York’s second-best baseball team reportedly now will seek to sell small ownership pieces to friends and family — rather than tapping one of the runners-up to Einhorn.
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