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Mets Tried To Woo Cougar Demographic Into Voting David Wright For All-Star Team
By
Ben Yakas
Published Jun 13, 2013
Modified Jun 13, 2013
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Jun 13, 2013
Modified Jun 13, 2013
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If you push aside David Wright, Matt Harvey, and that four game sweep of the Yankees last month, the Mets are having one of those disastrous, offensively-inept seasons they tend to have more often than not. But with Citi Field playing host to the All-Star Game, the team obviously wants to make sure they have at least one player in the starting lineup. But Wright is currently trailing Giants third baseman Pablo Sandoval by over 100K votes, which means the team has had to come up with some outside-the-box ideas to get more votes. Which is apparently how they ended up reaching out to cougar dating website Cougar Life for help.
In the most rotten example of cougar payola since Tom Jones won the MTV Video Music Award for Breakthrough Video for a Prince cover, Deadspin reports that a Mets employee approached "the cougar dating site for younger hot men to meet sexy older professional women" hoping to partner up in order to get Wright some much-needed votes. The staffer wrote:
We were wondering if you would be able to blog/post a story asking your users (who apparently admire David and would love seeing him play in the All-Star Game) to go to the below link to vote David and #VoteWrightNow as he needs their help.
Cougar Life was totally into the idea ("Quick question: David Wright is engaged, correct? If by chance he recently became single, we would love to do a "win a date" contest!"), but it seems the employee bit off more than he could chew, and had to pull out of the deal:
Unfortunately, we reached out trying to push David for the All-Star team before running our plan entirely up the chain internally. We received some pushback as we don’t feel a partnership working together would be the image that our team and David- especially since he recently got engaged- would like to portray. At this time, we don’t think a partnership together is in David’s or our organization’s best interest.
For their part, the organization admitted everything was true, and explained why they were so desperate for votes that they'd consider cougar payola to be a reasonable thing:
Last year there was a big swing of votes at the end that cost David the starting job. We decided to do everything to make sure that doesn't happen again this year. We ultimately elected to pass. We thank whoever leaked this to Deadspin for increasing awareness of #VOTEWRIGHTNOW at mets.com.
Forget it Jake, it's just another day in Metstown.
Tagged
All-Star Game
baseball
cougar life
cougar payola
cougars
david wright
mets
sports
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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