As the bubble burst on the high-flying bubble days of the late 90s and early aughts, the world watched some of the greediest, most unsavory corporate overlords act like scoundrels, then get their comeuppance. Few matched the avarice of Tyco International CEO Dennis Kozlowski.

A jury would eventually find Kozlowski and a fellow Tyco executive guilty of swindling $600 million from company coffers. Kozlowski’s most notorious purchase with those looted funds? A $2 million Roman Orgy birthday party for his wife, on the Italian island of Sardinia, complete with the finest food and drink, scantily-clad dancing girls, and an ice sculpture of Michaelangelo’s David…with vodka shooting from David’s frozen penis.

(Seriously, all this, and more, really happened).

Just as the wrong CEO can torpedo the biggest Fortune 500 company, so too can the wrong owner blow up a team’s chance at success. He can hire the wrong people, fire the wrong people, meddle too much in team affairs, or hurt the team in absentia. In extreme cases, he can even destroy his franchise’s credibility. One bad owner can do more to damage your favorite team’s fortunes than a broken farm system, a Swiss cheese starting rotation, a clueless manager, and a lineup of Yuniesky Betancourts put together.

The Mets are the latest example of a franchise facing major problems that have nothing to do with a slumping left fielder or a closer with anger management issues — though they have those too. The Wilpon family’s investments with felonious advisor Bernie Madoff have forced the Mets’ owners to put 20% to 25% of the team up for sale.

Unusual circumstances, to be sure. But after years of squandering some of the highest payrolls and richest revenue streams in the game, hiring the wrong general managers and letting a potential powerhouse rot on the vine, the Wilpons had already done enough to alienate their team’s fans.

At the most basic level, the story of the Mets under the Wilpon family is one filled with great expectations, and great disappointment. Running one of the highest annual payrolls in the game, in baseball’s biggest market (strip out the Yankees’ dominion, and the Mets still own enough territory and mind share to make your average Royals fan die of envy), the Mets have fielded one underachieving team after another.

Check out this chart showing team payrolls and winning percentages of major league teams over the past decade (the Mets are in red):

That’s a whole lot of playoff-miss seasons, with five years below .500. This chart is being somewhat generous too, since we made it an 11-year sample to avoid a selective start point that didn’t include the Mets’ 2000 World Series run.

Critics have descended on many scapegoats in recent Mets history. Steve Phillips developed a less-than-rosy reputation in the analytical community for his six years of often questionable player moves as Mets GM. Jim Duquette didn’t get much of a chance in his one season at the helm, though that one season did include trading Scott Kazmir for Victor Zambrano in a desperate (and unsuccessful) attempt to push a half-decent Mets team into the playoffs. Omar Minaya got credit for making big, splashy moves, including acquiring Johan Santana for what amounted to 53 cents on the dollar; he also threw too much money at Jason Bay, inexplicably cast his lot with Oliver Perez, and as he’d done in his previous gig, failed to successfully build out the rest of the roster to complement the team’s bigger-name players.

You can argue the merits of all these GMs (and managers), or rightfully point to a series of debilitating injuries that hit the Mets harder than nearly any other team in baseball. But the one common denominator throughout has been the rickety stewardship of the Wilpons. They’ve screwed up, their grip on the Mets is slipping, and suggestions of white knight investors like Carl Icahn or Mark Cuban are being ridiculed and swatted away, since who in their right mind would want to own a piece of the Wilpons-led Mets? It takes a special kind of incompetence to inspire a farcical Craigslist ad for your minority partner request.

All is not (yet) lost. The hire of Sandy Alderson was a nod toward common-sense leadership. By hiring a competent new head man, the Wilpons ensured that the new guy would in turn hire capable lieutenants to bolster the team’s cadre of decision makers. Now the challenge becomes, can the Wilpons let Alderson and his people do their work in peace?

The Minnesota Twins offer an example of how such a non-interventionist approach can work wonders. Carl Pohlad may have made his first fortune foreclosing on family farms during the Depression. And he may have held a gun to the heads of Minnesota’s legislature for the better part of a decade until the state finally agreed to spend taxpayer dollars to build the scheming billionaire a new ballpark. But Pohlad (and now his son, Jim) were also wise enough to let the Twins’ vaunted baseball operations, scouting and player development people do their work, and continue producing winning ballclubs. The right owner knows how to delegate. (The millions of fans now enjoying shiny, new Target Field might argue that taxpayer extortion has its benefits too.)

Or the Mets could simply take a page from their crosstown rivals. Every Yankees fan of my generation would run over their own mother just to graze Don Mattingly‘s sideburns — a testament to Donnie Baseball’s short-lived greatness, but more for being the lone standout in a decade of Alvaro Espinozas. The Yankees’ return to greatness didn’t start until George Steinbrenner trusted the people working for him to do the job right. The results of that trust are still evident on the field nearly two decades later: Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera…not to mention Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams, Robinson Cano, and other homegrown Yankees stars.

But if you insist on meddling, at least do it right. Cuban hasn’t yet realized his dream of owning a Major League Baseball team. But his management style with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks — spending top dollar for talent, building top-notch facilities, and hiring innovative minds to collaborate with coaches and create optimal game strategies — has contributed to the Mavs going from one of the league’s sad-sack franchises to a perennial playoff team. (Dirk Nowitzki turning into one of the greatest power forwards of all-time hasn’t hurt either.)

Find a plan that makes sense, and stick to it. It will help you avoid falling victim to investment schemes that promise runaway annual returns. And yes, it will help you run a better baseball club.