Amazin' discovery:
Mike meets the Mets

Column by (the ever-bitter) Mike Lupica

Sometimes you don't even have to buy a ticket to win the lottery. Sometimes all you have to do is be standing on the right street corner, on Roosevelt Avenue, Queens, N.Y., in this case, and here come some of the phoniest politicians in the history of New York City to start throwing money at you.

That is what happened over the past four days to the Wilpons, who own the Mets. They have had a plan to build a new ballpark for the Mets for years, hoping that they would get the chance to do that before Shea Stadium, the biggest dump in all of pro sports, fell down on top of them. As responsible tenants, they had been telling Mayor Michael Bloomberg that over the next 30 years, it would cost the city of New York welll over $300 million for repairs to Shea, capital improvements, and general maintenance.

"Only because the place is falling down," Jeffrey Wilpon, the chief operating officer of the Mets, said last night.

Bloomberg acted as if they weren't even in town.

The Mets couldn't even get near the front of the line for a new ballpark. Bloomberg, over the past couple of years, had become the mayor of the Hudson Railyards, the 13 acres on the West Side of Manhattan that Bloomberg wanted to give away to the Jets. They would build a stadium, Bloomberg and Dollar-a-Year Dan Doctoroff, the deputy mayor in charge of developers, would develop the whole area and maybe — or so these guys kept telling the taxpayers — New York City would even get the 2012 Summer Olympics, even if nobody outside of the NYC2012 offices ever has really believed that.

The Jets were ahead of them in line. So was Ratner of the Nets, who is somehow treated like New Yorker of the Year for basically getting the same development deal in Brooklyn that the Jets were trying to get on the West Side. Even the Yankees had jumped ahead in line, with this plan of theirs to build a new stadium at Macombs Dam Park, financing it almost entirely themselves, the city and state mostly throwing in infrastructure costs.

So here were the Mets, who didn't need to go to the MTA for a sweetheart deal on land because they had it right there in city-owned parking lots, who kept telling Bloomberg that it would be cheaper for him to pony up on a new ballpark than to keep the one they were already in from falling down faster than Bloomberg's approval ratings. They were a New York baseball team at a time when Bloomberg and Dollar-a-Year Dan were obsessed with a Jersey football team. They were playing their games in Queens at a time when Bloomberg and Dollar-a-Year Dan didn't seem to know that Queens was one of the five boroughs.

Then last week, Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver, from his place on the Public Authorities Control Board, stood up to the mayor and his deputy mayor, Gov. George Pataki and all of them, and told them they weren't going to get his vote of approval on the $300 million in state money they needed to go forward on a West Side stadium.

The Jets weren't going to get their stadium after all. Bloomberg wasn't going to build a whole new financial center for the city around Woody Johnson's football team. And Bloomberg and Dollar-a-Year Dan didn't have an Olympic stadium for their Olympic bid. Then a miracle happened, an even bigger miracle than the '69 Mets. All of a sudden, as a way of saving face, as a way of being what he desperately wants to be — hero mayor of New York — Fred and Jeff Wilpon looked pretty cute to him.

"Our revised bid will propose an Olympic stadium to be built in a facility that would also serve as a home for our wonderful Mets," Bloomberg said.

This after an entire administration when the only way Bloomberg could find Shea was when they pinned a note on him Opening Day and put him on the No. 7 train.

Now the Mets jump to the front of the line, winners of the New Stadium Lottery. The taxpayers still should never have to pay a dime of stadium money, because it never comes back to them and there has never been a credible study that says it does. The team should always have to pay it all. But if the numbers everybody was getting last night are real, especially about what the city would have to pay over time to keep Shea standing; if the city is only going to pay $85 million to the Mets instead of $300 million to the Jets and nobody is going to stop Bloomberg from doing this; if all that is true, this is the best of these deals anybody has talked about in New York lately.

The Mets? For a change, they can't lose. They get the ballpark whether New York gets the Olympics or not. If there is another miracle and New York does get the Olympics, they basically will build a temporary add-on to the original structure big enough for 40,000 extra seats. This is the way it worked with the Olympic stadium in Atlanta before they turned it into Turner Field. "Sometimes doing the right thing for the city is also good business," Jeff Wilpon said.

It is good for him, good for his father, good for Mets fans. They were in the right place at the right time. Sometimes that is the whole art of the deal. The Mets couldn't get the time of day from this mayor for four years. In four days, the Mets became Bloomberg's team. The Jets? Who are they?

The new Mets ballpark will be a beauty. Not nearly as much of a beauty as the mayor of New York.