Baseball Maverick Page 15

  Alderson was deep into his work in the D.R. when word reached him that Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig was pushing his name as the ideal candidate to take over as general manager of the Mets. The friendship between Selig and Mets owner Fred Wilpon went all the way back to 1980, the year Wilpon first became an owner of the Mets. “We got along beautifully right from the start,” Selig told me. “It transcended baseball and went to the rest of our lives. Our families get along, and they’re very close.” Over the years Selig and Wilpon remained close, though they did sometimes disagree on baseball matters. Selig was angry, for example, when the Mets ignored an MLB edict and announced the hiring of Art Howe as their new manager during the 2002 World Series.

  The Mets payroll had gone up to $149 million in 2009, second in baseball, but came down to $134 million in 2010, fifth in baseball, and the team finished that season in fourth place for the second straight year. Wilpon dismissed general manager Omar Minaya in early October 2010 and named assistant general manager John Ricco acting GM, then asked Ricco to help search for his own successor. Thanks to Selig’s nudge to his old friend Wilpon, the job looked to be Alderson’s if he wanted it.

  “Fred Wilpon is an extremely close friend, and I told him, ‘You’ll never do better than Sandy Alderson,’” Selig told me. “My view was it was important for the National League club in New York to be good, and you can’t put a club in better hands than Sandy Alderson. It was as simple as that. Fred thanked me for it and, I’m happy to say, hired him.”

  Selig’s tenure as commissioner was marked by an often deceptively iron fist. It was true he worked hard to generate consensus among owners on issues. It was also true that he built up a power base that meant that when he acted, his will was rarely defied; votes of the owners always went Selig’s way. Wilpon was in no position to spurn Selig’s directive.

  I asked Selig if, at the time he gave Wilpon his advice, he knew if Alderson would be interested.

  “I didn’t know,” Selig said at first, then elaborated. “You know, once you’re a general manager, you always want to be a general manager. I knew that he’d be interested.”

  Alderson at first did not know what to make of media reports that Selig was pushing him for the job of Mets general manager. He put in a call from the Dominican Republic to Major League Baseball and wound up on the phone with Rob Manfred, then a top Selig lieutenant, now the commissioner of baseball.

  “He was the one who told me, ‘Don’t worry about your commitment in the D.R. Go ahead and pursue it,’” Alderson recalled.

  At his farewell press conference in a Santo Domingo hotel conference room in early November 2010, Alderson told reporters: “Well I was only here for about eight or nine months but I think we made great progress during that time. We came here to restore the integrity of the baseball system here as well as the rest of Latin America. I think it’s important to keep in mind how important the Dominican Republic is to baseball and how many prospects come from the Dominican Republic, so it was logical for us to start here because there are so many players here.”

  From talking to Dominican reporters before and after the press conference, it was clear Alderson had made headway in his mission of demanding a higher level of accountability. Reporters I talked to said they hadn’t been sure what to think of Alderson when he was brought in as a Baseball Czar for Latin America, but he’d won their respect with his focus and his genuine interest in engaging a variety of parties in dialogue. On his watch, they told me, progress had been made in pursuing identity fraud, cracking down on the the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and bringing the scouting bureau to the D.R.

  “My job is to ensure that if a player says he’s sixteen years old, he’s sixteen and that if the player has a certain level of talent, that it’s a level of talent that is not enhanced by drugs, so as far as the market is concerned, it is what it is,” Alderson said. “The baseball community here knows more about me and feels less threatened than it did eight months ago and I certainly know more about the Dominican Republic and all of Latin America than I did eight months ago and I’m much better for it.”

  Juan DeJesus, manager of Latin American operations for ­Major League Baseball, worked closely with Alderson in the D.R. and received a crash course in taking unpopular stands but still being effective. “To go in and implement policies that are disruptive and put a process around what’s going on, you’re going to ruffle some feathers,” he told me. “But overall I think people appreciate that the game has been preserved, the integrity of the game, and that it’s in a better place and it will continue to grow and do well.”

  As Pedro Gomez of ESPN, who often reported from the D.R. for the network, put it: “It was widely considered the Wild West down there when it came to players using PEDs and falsifying their records. Who knew how old anyone was? Order was needed—and Alderson took some big steps in cleaning that up and bringing credibility.”

  There is no way of knowing for sure how much the Madoff situation was on Selig’s mind in pushing the Mets to hire Alderson, whom he had long regarded as an upright figure. “He’s very honest, very blunt, very direct,” Selig says of Alderson. “There is never a scintilla of doubt about his integrity. Never. I really mean this, I have a very, very high regard for him as a person and I like him a great deal.”

  Asked directly if he favored Alderson for the Mets because he was worried about the damage the Madoff fallout could do, Selig told me: “I’ve said this over and over and I am particularly close to the Wilpons, particularly Fred. I never had any genuine concerns about the Mets’ financial situation. Knowing what I know, and I know every club’s financial position, I wasn’t worried. And I say that to this day.”

  PART II

  “Come on, Blue!”

  When the New York Mets announced Sandy Alderson as their new general manager in October 2010, it was assumed his emphasis would be “Moneyball with money”—then came an era of dramatic belt-tightening.

  9

  ALDERSON’S BRAIN TRUST

  For New York fans, Sandy Alderson was far from a well-known figure. He had a can-do reputation, but with the low profile of a behind-the-scenes operator, despite his stint from 2005 to 2009 as CEO of the Padres. Alderson was known to well-informed fans for his work in putting together the powerhouse Oakland teams of the late ’80s, but a lot of seasons had come and gone since then. For most fans, the work of general managers was like the work of architects: easy to ignore, unless a structure suddenly collapsed and it was time to look for accountability or scapegoats. Alderson had earned headlines with his work at Major League Baseball—in particular his firm-handed showdown with the umpires, leading to a number of reforms that together added up to a major shift, all part of his high reputation among baseball insiders—but few fans gave this much thought. For them the only relevant questions are: When is my team going to start winning again? And if it doesn’t, who can I blame?

  For Mets fans there was a certain amount of relief in seeing an end brought to Omar Minaya’s tenure. Minaya was probably underrated overall as a Mets GM. No question he was a skilled evaluator of talent. Did he make some mistakes? He did. Above all, signing Jason Bay to a four-year, $66 million deal in December 2009, based mostly on one good season with the Red Sox. Before long he would be weighing down the Mets like a cement overshoe. Rewarding Oliver Pérez for unspectacular work for the Mets with a new three-year, $36 million contract in early 2009 was another unwarranted move that turned into a full-scale headache. Then again, also in December 2009, Minaya made a move that might have seemed like a footnote at the time, signing a thirty-five-year-old pitcher who had been with three different teams the three previous years, an enigma named R. A. Dickey. “He knew Dickey from way back and he made the judgment that he was better than his record and possibly on the verge of something, from a friendship, from knowing the guy as an athlete, but also as a human being, knowing what was in his heart,” New York Times columnist George Vecsey told me.

  Still, at the t
ime the move was greeted with the media equivalent of a Bronx cheer.

  “On a day when the Yankees acquired the Atlanta Braves’ ace, Javier Vazquez, to be their No. 4 starter, the Mets neared a deal with a converted knuckleballer who is missing a ligament in his right elbow,” Ben Shpigel reported in the Times.

  Minaya was hindered by his shortcomings as an administrator, which led to constant backbiting; his penchant for getting too chummy with too many of his players; and his lack of an early-warning system: Time and time again, he let issues play out in the press instead of keeping them out of the headlines in the first place. This was not all his fault; the hunger of the New York media is justly celebrated. But once the pattern was established, there was not much Minaya could do to avoid the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts torture of tabloid treatment, nothing short of winning the World Series.

  One thing the Mets had never quite mastered in the Wilpon years was branding. That is, if they’d had a deeper, underlying vision of who they were and what they represented, they never let on. The Mets forever fell into a cycle of reaction, sending mixed messages, or trying too hard, as many felt they were when they tried to evoke Ebbets Field in their designs for Citi Field, which was fine enough, but then also added a Jackie Robinson Rotunda, although of course number 42 never played in Queens. Branding takes discipline. This was something Alderson internalized very early in his time at Marine headquarters in Washington. Very often the best way to change an image was to do nothing, to take a hit rather than make a situation worse.

  The buzz in baseball when Alderson’s name started kicking around as a possible new Mets front-office figure focused less on ­Alderson’s attributes and more on his availability. Would he really take the job? “When Sandy’s name came up, I think from my perspective, it was just a matter of if he wanted the job,” John Ricco says. “There wasn’t anybody more suited to come in and handle what he needed to handle.” Alderson was not without mixed emotions about tackling so major a challenge, that much was obvious. Part of the job was going to entail waiting out some big, ugly contracts that were best forgotten sooner rather than later. It all shaped up as an exciting creative and intellectual challenge, not just trying to piece together enough good moves to rebuild a farm system and create a future winner, but far more fundamental, to reshape an entire culture and rebrand the Mets, creating a new identity as a team that was calm and determined and patient, focused on having a plan and sticking with the plan, not jumping to react every time sports talk radio or the tabloids hit the alarm button and hiring whichever aging, overrated free agent was being talked up that year.

  To the satisfaction of Mets ownership, the news of Alderson’s hiring was greeted with general acclaim in the press and among fans. The players reacted well, too. “It was exciting, because he came in and said that he was going to turn the team around and we were going to start winning,” recalled Ike Davis, a rookie that year. David Wright, the Mets’ leader in the clubhouse, applauded the hiring. David’s father, Rhon, was intrigued as well. “For Christmas that year my dad got me Moneyball,” Wright told me. “I figured I’d better start walking more and getting on base a little better.”

  It was a little like Danny Ocean was back on the move—and all the best guys wanted to be involved. Alderson had established Oakland as a rich breeding ground for front-office talent, opening the doors to Ivy League graduates who had earlier been shut out of baseball. Now that he was back in the saddle as Mets general manager, looking to assemble a team around him, he had his pick of bright executives. The ground was shifting so quickly, statistical analysis and data-driven decision-making evolving so rapidly, it was essential to be always looking for the next big thing, and Alderson set about putting together a formidable brain trust of Paul DePodesta, the former Dodgers general manager; J. P. Ricciardi, the former Blue Jays GM who had worked with Alderson years earlier in Oakland; and Ricco, who had been the Mets’ acting GM when Alderson was hired.

  Ricciardi almost said no.

  “Sandy, I have to be honest, I’m not the guy you knew sixteen years ago,” Ricciardi told him. “I don’t need the job. My family is more important to me. Baseball’s not going to take precedence over that. If you want that, I’d rather not come over.”

  Ricciardi was chosen by the Mets in the same draft as Billy Beane, 1980, and the two were teammates that year playing A ball in Little Falls, New York. Ricciardi, two years older than Beane, was through playing by the following year, but he caught on in the Yankees organization, coaching in 1982 for the Fort Lauderdale affiliate and then a year later for the New York–Penn League team. In 1986 Ricciardi contacted Dick Bogard, the A’s director of scouting, and started as an East Coast scout and roving instructor and worked his way up from there. He was, everyone agreed, a great natural evaluator of talent. He had the eye.

  “It was an opportunity,” Ricciardi told me. “Oakland had no scouts on the East Coast, and they were trying to build their scouting back up and get in the real world.”

  He did not hit it off with his new boss right away. “It was different,” he says of their first encounter. “It was the first time I ever met somebody who was not a traditional baseball guy, so to speak. This guy was running the A’s and he wasn’t a guy who had played, he wasn’t a guy who had been in the game from a scouting or player development background. He was a lawyer. I didn’t know what to think.”

  Ricciardi had flown to Arizona that October for organizational meetings, and somebody had handed out flimsy hats as gifts for everyone in the scouting department.

  “That’s a pretty cool hat,” Alderson said.

  “It’s a piece of crap,” Ricciardi replied.

  Alderson, Ricciardi, and Beane became a three-man unit in Oakland. That was when the analytical framework Alderson had been developing for years truly came into its own. “We first began to implement this extensively when Billy became the assistant GM and we got much more active in the six-year free-agent market,” Alderson says. “We signed Billy Taylor and Geronimo Berroa this way. Basically the way we allocated responsibility was we would do these statistical analyses, J.P. would go in the field, cross-check from a traditional scouting point of view, and then Billy had the assignment of signing the players. So he wasn’t really evaluating, but one of Billy’s qualities was he could talk anybody into anything. He had been a car salesman in the offseason.”

  The Blue Jays signed Berroa out of the Dominican Republic at age eighteen, and the Braves, Mariners, Indians, Reds, and Marlins all acquired him and let him go. He was on the proverbial scrap heap, with only 189 big-league at bats spread out over five years when the A’s signed him as a six-year free agent in January 1994. He had great wrists, and his power potential was never in question, but he lacked plate discipline. What the A’s noticed, though, was that over nine seasons in the minor leagues he’d only once notched a walks total that was more than 10 percent of his at bats—but that was his most recent season, 1993. He came to spring training, won a spot on the team, and by 1996 was a leader of the offense with thirty-six home runs, 106 RBIs, and an on-base percentage of .344. He had twelve big-league walks before he joined the A’s, but sixty-three in ’95 alone.

  The A’s did it time after time, finding value where others had missed it. Once Berroa was due for a bigger paycheck, the A’s unloaded him, trading him to Baltimore for righthanded pitcher Jimmy Haynes in 1997. It was a pattern they repeated again and again, a major part of how they reloaded in the mid-1990s. By the time Alderson handed the team over to Beane, the farm system had been restocked. The key to that rejuvenation was a combination of an analytic-driven approach, good scouting, and intense focus.

  “Back then it was always Full Metal Jacket, let’s win, let’s do this, let’s do that,” Ricciardi says.

  Pondering his future in 2010, Ricciardi felt no temptation to return to that kind of existence. He told Alderson: “I want the job for the right reasons, because I have a chance to work with you and learn.”

  They had
a series of conversations and Alderson persuaded Ricciardi that he, too, was a little less single-minded about baseball.

  “I’ve known Sandy since 1985,” Ricciardi says. “It hasn’t been until the last four years that I’ve really gotten him to open up. I’ve asked him a ton of questions about Vietnam. Going to work in New York. I wanted to be around good people again.”

  Ricciardi liked the idea of taking the relationship forward and also of being there for Alderson to talk through ideas, almost the way a bench coach does with a field manager.

  “My role is more to be a righthand man to Sandy,” he says, “maybe be the guy who can see the big-league club and not only assess the big league, but be able to talk to the coaches, talk to the managers, be able to give him some insights into where we are.”

  Paul DePodesta’s epiphany came one day in the offices of the Baltimore Stallions of the Canadian Football League, where he worked as an unpaid intern. The year was 1995 and DePodesta had just graduated from Harvard. “I really went there to play baseball,” he says. He played some shortstop, some outfield, but hurt his shoulder during his freshman year and was never really the same, though he stuck it out through his sophomore year. He also found he missed football, so started playing for the Crimson team as a sophomore, gradually earned the respect of the coaches, earned regular playing time his junior year, and was a starting wide receiver as a senior until he got hurt.

  DePodesta got along well with his coach, Mac Singleton, and by the end of his time at Harvard the econ major had decided to rule out a boring desk job in favor of following his love of sports. “What I really wanted to be at the time was a football coach,” DePodesta says. “I spent a lot of time watching film. I loved the strategy of it and I loved the physical competition that went along with it. I was trying to get that experience in the CFL. My hope was to get a graduate assistant coach job somewhere in football, get a graduate degree, and start coaching somewhere.”