Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
The potential sale of the New York Mets to hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen is all but dead, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said Thursday.
“My belief is there’s not going to be a transaction,” Manfred told reporters at the owners meeting in Orlando, Fla.
Cohen had been negotiating with the Wilpon family, which controls the Mets, since the middle of last year. The Mets and Cohen announced in December that they were negotiating a deal that would see Cohen become the team’s majority owner.
But the two sides reached an impasse over an unusual provision of the deal that would let Fred Wilpon, the managing owner of the Mets, and his son Jeff, the team’s chief operating officer, remain in their roles for five years after the completion of the sale, according to two people who were familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.