Bill Dutch’s response to Lindsay Kramer the next day consisted primarily of the following reminders: 1)The Mets approached the Chiefs first; 2)everybody in the city was in favor of the sale; 3)they were still $1 million in debt; 4)John Simone still owned some stock in the team, and was due to get some money out of the sale. Simone himself didn’t elaborate beyond his own tweets.

It’s possible Simone was trying to steer Kramer towards what his colleague Rick Moriarty reported soon after: more than half of the people who owned stock in the Chiefs were due to not get any money.

“We were supposed to do it every year,” current Chiefs general manager Jason Smorol insisted, regarding the handing over over deemed dormant stock. “I don’t know what was done before we got here." According to New York State’s Abandonment Property Law, Smorol was correct, but the optics were pretty bad: 5,626 out of the 16,579 shares of the Syracuse Chiefs, held by roughly 2,300 of the 4,000 stockholders, were considered abandoned in 2015 and sent to the state. It was initially reported that legally, even if those stockholders reclaimed their stock from New York, they were only entitled to $19, the value of the stock when it was taken away, and not the approximately $1,400 they were due to receive from the Mets sale. Moriarty wrote that because of this, an extra $5 million was about to go to the remaining stockholders (which include the members of Chiefs First). Smorol, who would receive a $35,000 bonus for his help in getting the Chiefs and Mets together, claimed the team did its due diligence and sent two mailings as legally required, as well as some “internet searches”, to find the missing citizens, businesses, and entities who made up the lost and forgotten. But as one of the abandoned stockholder pointed out, it really seemed like they could have done more.

Tollar said the Chiefs should have made a better effort to find him. Since his last name is not very common, the team could easily have found his current address with a quick Internet search, he said. Indeed, a reporter for syracuse.com performed a Google search using Tollar’s name and found his current address in the third listed search result.

This part of the story has a happyish ending: Syracuse.com found the agreement the Chiefs made with the Comptroller’s Office back in 2015 (made so the team wouldn’t get in trouble for not handing over the abandoned stock sooner). A provision read that anyone who called the office and asked for their stock back can get a new one issued, entitling them to the 2017 sale price. The Office of Unclaimed Funds was quickly flooded with calls and emails, and 903 claims representing 1,745 shares were verified by the November 27th deadline, bringing the value of each share after the Mets sale down from about $1,400 to $1,208. (One of those claims was made by the estate of George Steinbrenner, who owned stock when the Chiefs were a Yankees affiliate.)

If a bunch of people got the shaft, it did not seem to matter to those who didn’t. The sale was approved by quite a large margin.

The players were Ron Darling, Edgardo Alfonzo, and Tim Teufel

Some questions remain, such as “Where did the Chiefs and Mets come up with the $18 million sale price?” The few MLB teams who had bought their Triple A affiliates have been tight lipped about how much they spent, so we only know two other figures:

1)The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees were sold to SWB Yankees, which is owned by Mandalay Baseball Properties and the New York Yankees, for $14.6 million, but they also signed a 30-year lease for their home ballpark, with annual lease payments of $900,000 after factoring in potential budget overruns upon reconstructing the field. (In 2016, Forbes ranked the team the 26th most valuable minor league franchise. The Chiefs did not make the 50-team list.)

2)The very same Mandalay Baseball Properties sold the Oklahoma City RedHawks (renamed Dodgers) to Dodgers minority owner Peter Guber for a reported and never confirmed “$23 to $25 million.”

$18 million is about the median between those two main figures. The Chiefs board of directors hired the independent valuation firm Empire Valuation Consultants to set the price. It was originally reported that the “expenses incurred related to the merger, including the fee paid to Empire Valuation” came out to about $600,000, and that it would be factored into the price. At the meeting in which the Chiefs stockholders voted to sell the team to the Mets, it was said that Empire Valuation will receive $75,000. We also know that approximately $1 million of the 18 is to pay off the Chiefs’ debt.

Another question is when exactly their lease of NBT Bank Stadium with Onondaga County expires. In August 2016, soon after Jeff Wilpon called Syracuse, it was extended from 2022 to 2026, with the Chiefs paying $200,000 a year and the county on the hook for utilities and field maintenance. In every article since the Mets sale was announced, the lease ends in 2025. Initially it was reported that the penalty for breaking the lease was “hefty”: $290,000 a year plus 7 percent interest, so this could potentially be a problem.

But for now everybody is happy, basking in the glow of starting over. Since Mets prospects wont be filling the Chiefs roster until 2019, Syracuse fans have over a year to learn all of the words to “Meet the Mets”.

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