But Jay Z has to be given some credit for trying.
The new sports mogul, who picked up Cano earlier this year from super-agent Scott Boras in a coup for his new sports repping company, is trying to get top dollar for his client. That includes pressing the Yankees, who have said the requested 10 years and $300 million for Cano is not “realistic.” It also seems to include drumming up some competition for the Yankees, as few other teams have the financial ability — or even want to pretend to have the ability — to lure the free agent, who with his skill set should end up with one of the fattest contracts in the game.
The Mets emphasized Tuesday that they are not in the running for Cano, and they said they agreed to the meeting with Jay Z after he initiated it.
“They requested a meeting,” Mets general manager Sandy Alderson said, according to ESPN.com. “We had a nice dinner. They made a presentation. We talked generally. And that was it. As I said, we were approached.”
Alderson ended up talking at length about the unproductive meeting, though. He shared how “engaged” Jay Z was and noted the amount of gusto behind the presentation, including “PowerPoint. Books. Pamphlets.”
Most curious to Alderson, though, was how it was quickly apparent that the crux of the meeting was not swaying the people at the meeting, but rather just having a meeting with those people there. Or, in words Alderson was essentially saying without saying: Jay Z used the Mets as a decoy to make it appear another high spender was going after Cano.
“It wasn’t terribly surprising that the fact of the meeting became known within minutes of dessert,” Alderson said. “Yeah, we factored that in. On the other hand, there are very few things that you can expect to be kept confidential. I think you have to go into these situations with the understanding that at some point they will become public.”
The Mets aren’t interested in springing for a contract of Cano’s size, and Alderson termed the get-together as a “preliminary meeting” that was “a little bit overdone” by Cano’s team.
If Cano’s agents want to take this a step beyond Boras and really get Cano his cash, they do need to get another team bidding. Maybe they should have slipped some $20 bills or non-Bernie Madoff stock options into those pamphlets.
