Shea Stadium Demolition Auction Process In Shambles?

The group responsible for handling the auction of thousands of items from the soon to be demolished Shea Stadium sent out a rather embarassing email earlier today. It is an admission that the process hasn't gone as it should have. Part of it appears to have resulted from a personnel change as a result of a family situation with one of the principal individuals in charge of the auction system, but read the rest to see just how screwed up the process is:

Dear Shea Collector,

It has been four weeks since our 15-day window to decommission Shea Stadium and secure its relics for the Shea Memorabilia Collection ended. It's been four hectic weeks in which we have been identifying, inventorying, shipping and delivering the thousands of artifacts that were preserved from Shea.

It has been an exciting challenge, an honor to be entrusted with the responsibility of placing the tangible memories of Shea into the hands of so many loyal Mets fans like yourself. Thanks to all of you who have ordered items, and thanks to all of you who have patiently awaited the delivery of those items.

A number of you have had questions regarding the process, and your orders. We apologize that the process has not gone as quickly as we all had hoped. The purpose of this e-mail is to provide an explanatory update on this once-in-a-lifetime project since the hurculean task of removing, packing, trucking, unpacking, and inventorying nearly 10,000 items is taking longer than we had initially expected.

First, a sad note of explanation. Jim Montague, who was hired in August to direct the Shea Memorabilia Project, tendered his resignation last week. A serious personal situation in his immediate family arose in early October. Jim tried to work through it, but the situation has required him to leave his position at MeiGray to attend full-time to his family. We wish Jim the best.

I will be handling Jim's accounts, so any of you who had been working with Jim should now feel free to contact me. My cell phone is 908-581-6688, and I will be happy to address any issues that Jim had been unable to address the past few weeks.

Some of you have already learned that a number of items ordered were not available. Theft and vandalism occurred during the 15-day process at Shea. And unfortunately, some items were inadvertently damaged or destroyed during the removal phase. We apologize for this, and will make every attempt to give you the opportunity to choose another item, or receive a refund.

We are in the process of completing all orders, and expect to have them shipped or ready for delivery by the end of the month.

We have heard from some collectors whose delivered items lacked MLB Authentication. While MLB Authenticated worked extremely hard to hologram every item during the 15 days, the mind-boggling task of handling 10,000 items insured that a few items would slip through the cracks.

Please contact us immediately at 888-463-4472 if you received an item that lacks MLB Authentication so we can attempt to remedy the problem. Items that can be easily shipped should be returned immediately to us for authentication. Please contact us to arrange these returns.

Next month, we plan to send everybody an updated list of what's available, offer a few new and exciting Shea products that were not on our initial list, and kickoff Shea Memorabilia Auction No. 3 at mlb.com/shea.

Thanks again, Barry Meisel
MeiGray Group, President and Chief Operating Officer

The key question obviously is just how many people were affected by these problems. Those issues are necessarily left vague, but one gets the impression that it was significant enough to get the head of the company to issue an email to everyone involved in the auction process. We're talking about items ranging in price from $50 for a brick up to thousands of dollars for clubhouse lockers for the players.

Oh, and here's a kicker. The link they provide at the end (mlb.com/shea) doesn't work.