Baseball Maverick Read online

  BASEBALL

  MAVERICK

  Also by Steve Kettmann

  One Day at Fenway: A Day in the Life of Baseball in America

  BASEBALL

  MAVERICK

  How Sandy Alderson

  Revolutionized Baseball

  and Revived the Mets

  STEVE KETTMANN

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2015 by Steve Kettmann

  Photos on pages x and 22, courtesy of Sandy Alderson; photos on pages 132 and 234, courtesy of the New York Mets.

  Jacket design by Mark Cohen/MJC Design

  Author photograph © Sarah Ringler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-1998-8

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9256-1

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For

  Sarah

  I found Sandy fascinating. He had such a different way of looking at things. It doesn’t seem unique now because we’re used to it, this is what you expect GMs to be, but back then, you talk about a maverick, this was a maverick. He was smart enough to know what he didn’t know, but he was also smart enough to question what everyone perceived to be as givens. He had the self-confidence to question things and look for a better way. I knew I was never going to be as smart as Sandy. Every day that I went in, I was going to learn something that was going to make me better.

  —Billy Beane

  We must learn to see with the eyes of today, and not insist on looking through the dusty spectacles of yesterday.

  —Eric Walker, The Sinister First Baseman

  and Other Observations

  A lot of this statistical stuff is overkill. If you get on base and hit for power, you’re a good offensive player. If you’re a pitcher, you do the opposite: You don’t walk anybody and you keep the ball in the ballpark.

  —Sandy Alderson

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Rounding a Corner

  Part I: The Marine Shakes Up Baseball in Oakland

  1Khe Sanh

  2Poster Boy

  3Holy Toledo!

  4Hooked Up with Apple

  5Computer Helps A’s Zap Tigers

  6The Google of Baseball

  7Earthquake

  8Passing the Torch

  Part II: “Come on, Blue!”

  9Alderson’s Brain Trust

  10The Madoff Mess

  11Winter Meetings 2012

  12Spring Training 2013

  13Sweep

  14Patience

  15The Best Day of the Year

  16“Come On, Blue!”

  Part III: Line in the Sandy

  17Hangin’ with Jay-Z

  18The Ninety-Win Challenge

  19Don’t Think

  20Fizzle

  21“Throw a Goddamned Fastball!”

  22Hanging by a Thread

  23Back to Where It All Started

  24The Future Is Now

  Epilogue: Zero Hour for the Mets

  Acknowledgments

  BASEBALL

  MAVERICK

  Sandy Alderson (right), then a Dartmouth undergraduate, visited Vietnam in the summer of 1967. His father, John Alderson (left), violated strict rules to take him up in his B-57 for a strafing run.

  PROLOGUE

  ROUNDING A CORNER

  Sandy Alderson and the Mets were sliding toward the abyss in the summer of 2011, and the former Marine combat officer in Vietnam was far too open-eyed a leader to soft-pedal that grim reality to himself or anyone else. He’d watched teams spiral downward into hopelessness. He understood that, as surely as running a team in California had meant bracing for earthquakes, taking over the Mets meant living with a weird combination of perpetually high expectations and searing negativity. Alderson had accepted a nudge from Bud Selig and taken over as Mets general manager in November 2010 knowing his central challenge, even more than trimming deadweight contracts and rebuilding a barren farm system, was to overhaul a Mets culture of self-defeating angst and to replace it with a quiet, can-do confidence. This he sought to do not through slogans, but through a systematic redesign of Mets baseball operations, a vigorous effort to unite players behind an offensive philosophy that combined aggressiveness and patience and, above all, success on the field. Posting wins, to break up the gloom of losing, was the only meaningful endorsement of the new doctrine of plate discipline and the only reliable antidote to cycles of panic leading to sudden desperation moves. He would have to insist on true change, even if it took years to implement.

  Alderson had not expected a honeymoon period, which was a good thing. So much had gone so wrong so quickly by July 2011, it was enough to cause whiplash. The tone for his first spring training as Mets general manager was set not by any adrenaline-surge offseason acquisitions to the lineup, but by owner Fred Wilpon’s combative defense against allegations of financial impropriety relating to the misdeeds of his friend and financial adviser Bernie Madoff. “One thing that no one ever, ever, in fifty years in business, questioned was my integrity,” Wilpon told reporters during a spirited press conference that February 16 at the Mets’ spring-training complex in Port St. Lucie, Florida. “And you all have questioned my integrity. And I intend to go through with whatever is necessary to vindicate that and get on with our lives. By vindication, I mean, number one, everybody will know we had nothing to do with it, we didn’t know anything about it, and we were duped.”

  Alderson’s hiring as Mets general manager the previous November had inspired much talk of “Moneyball with money,” a reference to the statistics-oriented, do-more-with-less approach that his protégé in Oakland, Billy Beane, had made famous. Soon it became clear that the “with money” part of this formulation could be deleted. Alderson had known about the Mets ownership’s involvement with Madoff when he took the job, but he had not grasped the scale of the impact it would have on the club’s finances, leading to one of the largest one-year drops in payroll in baseball history. I’ve known Alderson since I covered him in the ’90s in my years as an A’s beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, and I knew just how frustrating he had to find this shift in fortunes. But I also knew he was stubborn. Discussing it later during one of our more than one hundred interviews for this book, Alderson told me he would have taken the job even if he’d understood what was coming on the financial front, just out of love for a good challenge.

  No real progress could be made, Alderson knew, until the team started winning. Everything that happened before then was mere prologue. Until the club took the field with respect and confidence, playing each game with the talent and attitude of a team capable of going to the World Series, all efforts to redefine the culture of the Mets would
be Sisyphean. Alderson was, famously, a realist. He dealt in that which was, not that which might be. He knew he needed to make the team better fast, to communicate his message, but suddenly he was in cost-cutting mode. This was going to take time.

  Who were the Mets in the summer of 2011? Casting a neutral eye on the team on the field was like gazing out on a nondescript stretch of landscape along an interstate highway with few landmarks. Third baseman David Wright, going on twenty-nine that year, was a former Gold Glove winner and a beautiful hitter; his average had dipped to .283 in 2010 after five straight seasons over .300, but he still had twenty-nine homers and 103 RBIs to lead the Mets in both categories. Wright was part of the future. Shortstop Jose Reyes, still boyish at twenty-seven, was one of the more captivating players ever to put on a Mets uniform. He made his debut for the Mets in 2003 as a nineteen-year-old kid and his energy and joy in the game were off the charts. The fans loved him, and for good reason. He could turn even an ordinary late August game between two noncontending teams into something exciting. Reyes, too, was a player the Mets would love to have in their future, if they could afford him. The rest of the infield was a work in progress—two twenty-six-year-old contact hitters, Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner, could plug in at multiple infield positions, and Ike Davis, son of former big-leaguer Ron Davis, was a young prospect with power the Mets hoped to develop into their first baseman of the future. As their regular catcher they’d given the nod to twenty-four-year-old Josh Thole, trusting he’d work well with the pitchers and hoping he’d show enough offense not to be a liability.

  The outfield looked more promising. Switch-hitting power hitter Carlos Beltrán, now thirty-four, had missed much of the last two seasons with injuries, and knee issues limited him to three games in 2011 spring training, but the hope was he’d rebound to the form he’d shown with the Mets from 2006 to 2008, finishing each of those years with more than 110 RBIs. Angel Pagan, the Mets’ fourth-round pick in the 1999 draft, hit .290 for the Mets in 2010, though with only forty-four walks, and was a dynamic presence in center field. Left fielder Jason Bay had run into fresh trouble after being limited to six homers in ninety-five games for the Mets the year before in his first season after signing a four-year, $66 million deal with Alderson’s predecessor, Omar Minaya, following Bay’s thirty-six-homer, 119-RBI season for the Red Sox in 2009. Bay opened 2011 on the disabled list with a strain of his oblique muscle and never found himself at the plate; he was batting .223 on June 3 and .232 on July 18. His bat speed and entire approach were off.

  The expectation for 2011 had been that staff ace Johan Santana, out of action with a shoulder injury, would be pitching for the Mets by midseason. The Mets had packaged Carlos Gómez with three other players in a February 2008 trade with Minnesota to land Santana, and he was 16-7 that first season with a league-leading 2.53 ERA. He was effective each of the next two seasons, but as of July 2011 the Mets were still waiting for him, hoping that a short outing in Port St. Lucie late that month meant he would soon be back in the big leagues. Six-foot-seven righthander Mike Pelfrey, their first-round pick in 2005, was coming off a breakthrough 15-9 season in 2010, but he struggled in 2011 and fell to 5-9 by July 17. Left-hander Jon Niese, a seventh-round pick in 2005, recorded his tenth win by July 26, but the surprise of the 2011 rotation was little-noticed Dillon Gee, a control pitcher with no overpowering pitches the Mets had picked up almost as an afterthought in the twenty-first round of the 2007 draft. Gee was off to a 9-3 start in 2011, his ERA at 3.67 through July 19. As for the bullpen, the intriguing names were Bobby Parnell, a reliever with a 2.83 ERA in 2010 and clear late-inning ability, and Jason Isringhausen, originally drafted in 1991 by the Mets and part of the highly touted “Generation K,” who was resigned by the Mets in early 2011 to a minor-league deal after he’d been out of baseball the previous year rehabbing following Tommy John surgery. Over the course of the season, the thirty-eight-year-old Isringhausen mentored Parnell in the art of closing games, reminding Alderson of the value of veteran leadership in the bullpen.

  At the other extreme was closer Francisco Rodríguez, whose presence had developed into a full-blown distraction. Signed under the Minaya regime in December 2008 to a three-year, $37 million deal following his sixty-two-save season for the Angels, Rodríguez was an All-Star for the Mets in 2009, but by August 2010 he had become an out-and-out liability. K-Rod, who had also mixed it up in the bullpen with easygoing coach Randy Niemann that season, was arrested at Citi Field on August 11 after punching Carlos Peña, the grandfather of his children—a ruckus that confirmed the Mets’ worst fears about his judgment and commitment to the team, and led to season-ending surgery. Rodríguez had to go, but the Mets’ options looked bleak. The way his contract was written, he had to finish only fifty-five games for the Mets in 2011 to trigger an option for 2012 that would pay him $17.5 million. One possibility would have been to keep him out of action, but that risked a beef with the players’ union. “Everybody said we’re never going to be able to get rid of him,” Alderson told me.

  Rodríguez switched agents, opting to go with Scott Boras, who told baseball writer Ken Davidoff, “Francisco Rodríguez is a historic closer. He’s not going anywhere to be a setup man.”

  Oh yes he was. Rodríguez’s prior agent had failed to clarify which teams Rodríguez was ruling out for trades, and that left the way clear for Alderson to act. On July 12, 2011, the Mets traded Rod­ríguez to the Brewers along with cash for two players to be named later, who turned out to be pitcher Danny Herrera, a five-foot-six screwballer, and minor-leaguer Adrian Rosario. “We moved him and saved the money,” Alderson explained. “It wasn’t clear what Boras knew or didn’t know about the no-trade list, but I wasn’t prepared to wait to find out.”

  That was deft work, but only a small start in making progress on the formidable challenge of pivoting the Mets toward a brighter future. Baseball America had ranked the Mets twenty-fifth out of thirty teams in its 2010 Organization Talent Rankings, with the explanation, “Most of the Mets’ top prospects are products of the international market—RHP Jenrry Mejia, SS Wilmer Flores, OF Fernando Martinez—where the club has spent more of its resources.” A year later the Mets were up to twentieth out of thirty, but still had a lot of work to do in developing their farm system. One highlight was the team’s first-round pick in 2010, Matt Harvey, a hard-throwing righthander out of the University of North Carolina who in 2011 was 8-2 with a 2.37 ERA in A ball. Minaya had landed a good one there.

  Alderson’s biggest quandary in 2011 was what to do about Reyes, so electric a presence in the lineup. The truth was, even in the face of bad financial news for the team, Alderson hoped to keep Reyes. So when in mid-June he put in a call to Reyes’ agent, Peter Greenberg, to see if they could make progress toward a new contract, it was not PR and it was not going through the motions. But Reyes was having a career year, batting .345 to lead the National League as of June 15, and decided to wait for the end of the season to test the free-agent market. He thought he could snag a long-term deal for more than $20 million per year.

  That was probably more than the team could afford. Then again, in that period of sudden contraction in payroll, Alderson really did not know what was possible and what was not. He knew he needed to try to unload either Reyes or Beltrán, also a free agent at year’s end, before the July 31 trade deadline, but there, too, lay great uncertainty; the market was often volatile when it came to what in baseball were called rentals, big-ticket free agents a team would be acquiring only for the remainder of that season. Back in his days as general manager of the Oakland A’s, Alderson had wound up in that worst of all positions, needing to unload a star no matter what, and ended up trading Mark McGwire to the St. Louis Cardinals for three obscure pitchers in 1997, the year before he set a single-season home-run record and revived that franchise. Alderson knew he needed to play his hand strong on Beltrán. That meant he could not dangle both Reyes and Beltrán going into the trade deadline, not if the Mets wanted to get as much as the
y could for Beltrán. Getting real value in return for Beltrán was going to be challenging enough. As columnist Joel Sherman put it in the New York Post: “Alderson will have to be a magician in the next few days to pull a no-doubt, high-end prospect out of a hat.”

  There were a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the Mets getting much value for Beltrán, starting with lurid memories of his postseason failure five years earlier. It’s one thing for a role player to strike out with the bases loaded to end a season, but when a star does it—when he goes down looking, the way Beltrán did to close out Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championship Series—that puts a defective goods stamp on a player. Beltrán’s talent was never questioned and it seemed understandable for the Mets to award him a $119 million contract in 2005, the largest in franchise history at the time. But for all the talk in certain quarters about how postseason success is a question of luck, the fact is there are players who bring an added competitive fire to the big moments, and Beltrán had branded himself as the guy who hadn’t even taken the bat off his shoulder with the season on the line. It wasn’t fair, since he’d proven himself before, batting a torrid .435 for the Houston Astros in the 2004 postseason with eight home runs, but life for sports stars in New York was often not fair.

  Weeks before the trade deadline, the picture remained uncertain. Many teams were interested in adding Beltrán to the mix for the stretch drive, but how interested? So much was based on rumor, on teams working reporters to create the perceptions they wanted, and many reporters played along, happy to throw speculation out there on the off chance they might end up being right. Teams by this point all had pro scouting departments that studied the assets of each big-league team. It wasn’t enough to know which club might be looking to get Beltrán, either to fix a glaring hole in its lineup or simply to make an incremental upgrade out of sheer habit; the key was identifying teams that wanted Beltrán enough and had valuable trade fodder. That analysis led Alderson and his staff to focus their attention on five teams: the Milwaukee Brewers, Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Red Sox, Texas Rangers, and San Francisco Giants. These were teams with prospects to offer and they were teams that might meet Beltrán’s criterion of only wanting to waive his no-trade clause if he was ­being dealt to a team headed for postseason action. Early on Beltrán had indicated he would waive the no-trade only for Milwaukee or Philadelphia, which gave those teams bargaining leverage, but there were growing indications of greater flexibility from Beltrán.