How Sandy Alderson has leveraged the offseason for the Mets

While the Wipons are leveraged to the hilt, this offseason has been a textbook case about how a team and a general manager use leverage (or have it used against them.) While TNT canceled the TV show “Leverage,” that word is still being used more today than I’m guessing any of us would have imagined just five years ago. So, what is leverage? The dictionary definition is as follows: 1. a. The action of a lever. b. The mechanical advantage of a lever. 2. Positional advantage; power to act effectively: “started his . . . career with far more social leverage than his father had enjoyed” (Doris Kearns Goodwin). 3. The use of credit or borrowed funds to improve one’s speculative capacity and increase the rate of return from an investment, as in buying securities on margin. We’re focused more on the definitions listed second and third, although at this point it shouldn’t surprise us if the first definition makes it into our sports lexicon soon, too. The Wilpons are leveraged to the hilt –...