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Nelson Doubleday Jr., Publisher Who Owned the Mets, Dies at 81

Nelson Doubleday Jr. above, at a Mets game against the Atlanta Braves at Turner Field in 1999.Credit...G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times

Nelson Doubleday Jr., who shortly after taking over his family’s publishing business used it in 1980 to buy the lowly New York Mets and put the team on course to win the World Series in 1986, died on Wednesday at his home in Locust Valley, N.Y. He was 81.

The cause was pneumonia, his son-in-law John Havens said.

Books and baseball defined Mr. Doubleday’s life. He was the grandson of Frank Nelson Doubleday, who founded the publishing company bearing his name in 1896, and the son of Nelson Doubleday, who built the business into a mass-market powerhouse.

Another Doubleday ancestor was Abner, a great-great-granduncle long credited (erroneously) with inventing the game of baseball. Growing up on the family’s Long Island estate, in Oyster Bay, Nelson Jr. was a passionate baseball fan, following the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio.

He expressed his love for the sport on a grand scale when Doubleday & Company became majority owner of the last-place Mets in 1980, buying the team from the original owners, the family of Joan Whitney Payson. Doubleday put up 80 percent of the $21.1 million purchase price, a record at the time for a baseball franchise. Its partners were the City Investing Corporation and Fred Wilpon, of the real estate investing firm Sterling Equities.

He and Mr. Wilpon invested a further $20 million over the next three years to rebuild the franchise, a daunting task. “The Mets were not only a last-place team, but a well-entrenched last-place team,” Mr. Doubleday recalled in the euphoric year of 1986. “A classic last-place team.”

Allergic to the limelight and a delegator by inclination, Mr. Doubleday kept in the background. An exception was his lead role in a successful campaign to oust Bowie Kuhn as commissioner of baseball — Kuhn wanted the teams in major markets to subsidize teams in smaller cities — and replace him with Peter V. Ueberroth.

A stark contrast to his counterpart in the Bronx, George M. Steinbrenner, Mr. Doubleday left the running of the club to its general manager, Frank Cashen, and its managers, the first being Joe Torre.

“You get good people to do a job and then you don’t spend too much time looking over their shoulders,” Mr. Doubleday told The New York Times in 1980. In 1986, when Davey Johnson was managing the team, the pitcher Ron Darling said: “When the dugout telephone rings, you never imagine it’s Nelson Doubleday. It isn’t, and it never could be. Not with that owner. And not with that manager.”

Four years after the purchase, the Mets were a profit-making franchise and a pennant contender, finishing second in their division in 1984 and ’85. In 1986, when the team won the World Series, attendance at Shea Stadium had risen fourfold since 1980, and the team’s earnings totaled $6 million.

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Mr.  Doubleday, left, and Fred Wilpon, with whom he bought the Mets in 1980.Credit...Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

Nelson Doubleday Jr. was born in Oyster Bay on July 20, 1933. He attended Green Vale School in Glen Head on Long Island and the Eaglebrook School and Deerfield Academy, both in Deerfield, Mass., before enrolling at Princeton At the university he played baseball, football and hockey. After graduating with a degree in economics in 1955, he worked briefly as a copywriter at Doubleday before serving with the Air Force in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Returning to the family business, he was an assistant in the promotion and subsidiary rights departments, then manager of the trade publications division. He later became chairman of Doubleday’s new broadcast subsidiary and then executive vice president in charge of sales.

In 1973 he gained full control of the company stock left to him by his father, who died in 1949. With the stock left to him by his mother, who died in 1978, he had a controlling interest, and in May 1978 he became president and chief executive.

Mr. Doubleday was an avid outdoorsman, fond of practical jokes and not particularly bookish. He enjoyed playing golf; hunting at his plantation near Beaufort, S.C.; sailing the world on his yacht, Mandalay; and heading off to annual pheasant-hunting trips in Somerset, England. In the 1960s and ’70s, he invested in two hockey teams, the California Golden Seals and the New York Islanders. On his daily drive into Manhattan, he chatted with a group of fellow CB radio enthusiasts who called themselves the Cuckoo’s Nest Convoy. His handle was Bookworm.

“There is an axiom in this field: You go into it because you love books,” Scott Meredith, a top literary agent who worked with Mr. Doubleday’s father, told Fortune magazine in 1987. “Nelson is a smart man. But he never had the passion.”

Mr. Doubleday, whose first marriage ended in divorce, had homes in Hobe Sound, Fla., and Nantucket. He is survived by his wife, the former Sandra Pine Barnett; two sisters, Ellen Violet and Neltje, who uses only one name; four daughters, Wendy Havens, Lillian Woodworth, Nanki Doubleday and Phoebe Timpson; two stepchildren, Duke Barnett and Alexis Barnett; 13 grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

As the Mets’ fortunes waxed, Doubleday’s waned. At the time Mr. Doubleday took over the team, his publishing company reported sales of $350.9 million, up 7 percent from the previous year, and net earnings of $16.6 million, up 10 percent. By 1985, however, Doubleday was in dire straits. In the fiscal year that ended April 30, it earned only $300,000 on sales of more than $400 million.

Galvanized, Mr. Doubleday enlisted the help of James R. McLaughlin, the head of Dell, a Doubleday subsidiary, to streamline and downsize. He named Mr. McLaughlin chief executive of the publishing company and became its chairman.

The next year, he stunned the publishing industry by selling the family business for a reported $500 million to the German company Bertelsmann. The deal did not include the Mets, which Mr. Doubleday and Mr. Wilpon had purchased from Doubleday & Company for $85 million, with an agreement to assume $25 million in team liabilities, including player contracts.

In 2002, Mr. Wilpon bought out Mr. Doubleday’s interest in the Mets for $135 million, after a bitter public feud over the monetary value of the team.

It was the end of an era, the playing out of a private dream by a man who, when he bought the team, said that one of his main motivations was to “give somebody some fun they otherwise couldn’t have.”

A correction was made on 
June 20, 2015

An obituary on Thursday about Nelson Doubleday Jr., the publisher who for many years was an owner of the Mets, misstated the date of his death in some editions. He died on Wednesday, not on Tuesday. The obituary also misstated the given name of the man he named chief executive of Doubleday & Company in 1985. He is James R. McLaughlin, not John. The obituary also referred incorrectly to the Mets’ finances in the 1986 season, when the team won the World Series. The Mets’ total earnings — not gate receipts — were $6 million. And the obituary misstated Doubleday & Company’s earnings in 1985 in some editions. In the fiscal year that ended April 30, the company earned $300,000 on sales of more than $400 million, not $7 million on sales of $472 million.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Nelson Doubleday, Publisher and Mets Buyer, Dies at 81. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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