Baseball Maverick Page 16

  Aric Holsinger, the Stallions CFO and a former Baltimore Orioles CFO, happened to have a collection of Major League Baseball media guides. “I was thumbing through some of the media guides, and I came across a bio for Sandy Alderson,” DePodesta told me. “He was a Dartmouth grad, a Harvard grad, a Marine. I remember being so struck by that and thinking, ‘This is my kind of guy!’ It was much more my profile than anything I was used to seeing in professional sports. At the time it definitely served as inspiration to me that a career path like that would actually be possible. I don’t think it’s something I’d ever contemplated previously.”

  DePodesta’s thoughts turned more toward baseball, even as he continued to work for the Stallions during the day, doing a little of everything. At night he was also interning for the Baltimore Bandits of the American Hockey League, a role that entailed throwing ­T-shirts into the stands and propping up fans as they walked out onto the ice between periods to participate in contests or whatever else came up.

  He had an in with the Indians, who had just gone to the 1995 World Series, and was hoping to land an internship. “I was ridiculously lucky,” DePodesta says. “I sent my stuff in, went in and interviewed, and while I was there I found out it was for the whole year, not just spring training.” It had all seemed like a lark, but suddenly it looked much more serious when Mark Shapiro, who had interviewed him, offered him a job in the Indians’ front office.

  “I thought, ‘This isn’t something I can turn down,’” DePodesta says. “I’m in the Canadian Football League. These guys were just in the World Series.”

  DePodesta took the job, which involved working closely with Josh Byrnes, the assistant in baseball operations. “It was a great, great learning experience, my equivalent of graduate school in baseball,” he says. “In spring training, I was the minor-league van driver! Once the season began, I charted all of the major-league games and helped assist in various areas of player development. As the year continued, I started working on projects for the major-league coaching staff, John Hart and Dan O’Dowd. At the conclusion of the season, I became the major-league advance scout.”

  He was, without a doubt, a new breed, a thinker but not a geek; he’d played college football and could take a hit. He may not have been as gregarious and socially at ease as Billy Beane always had been, but he did just fine taking to his new environment. The Indians sent him out late in the 1996 season to do a little pro scouting and at first he felt some culture shock. He was watching the Yankees and the Sox at Fenway the last week of the season, and no one was talking to him in the scout section until a smiling, intense, hawk-nosed Massachusetts local approached him. It was J. P. Ricciardi, at the time special assistant to Oakland A’s general manager Sandy Alderson.

  “I was a twenty-three-year-old who was clearly out of place,” DePodesta told me. “J.P. was the one guy who actually introduced himself to me and said hello. We struck up a friendship.”

  Billy Beane was hiring an assistant in 1999, Ricciardi recommended DePodesta, and soon Beane and DePodesta were running the show in Oakland. “Paul and I kind of had that Risky Business moment, you know, Tom Cruise in his underwear, where we realized, ‘You mean we’ve got the house to ourselves?’” Beane told me.

  “There’s no doubt that Sandy, going back probably fifteen years previous, had been the one to introduce a systematic approach to decision-making,” DePodesta says. “There had to be information out there that would facilitate better decision-making. All that was in place by the time I got there. It’s almost like he went through every­thing he had to do to build the first personal computer. And then when Billy and I were there we said, ‘We could also write software for this thing. Who knows what we could do with this thing?’ The perseverance, the smarts, everything it took to create that framework, Sandy had done, and then we kind of ran with it.”

  Alderson later recommended DePodesta for the job of Dodgers GM, though they’d never actually worked together, and hired him in San Diego, where he was working when Alderson took over the Mets.

  “When Sandy called and asked if I would go to New York, to be honest it wasn’t that difficult a decision,” DePodesta says. “First, the opportunity to work with him again was a real lure. He was also bringing J.P., which was a real attraction. It was a chance to do something with those people and to do it in New York. I’ve had my share of both big market and small market, so I don’t necessarily believe that the grass is always greener, but I was excited about the opportunity to do something special in a place like New York.”

  DePodesta was running player development and scouting and was doing a lot of scouting himself; Ricciardi oversaw pro scouting, handled special assignments, and also did pro scouting himself; Ricco, assistant general manager, handled many of the administrative aspects of the big-league operation and was also involved with salary arbitration. Ricco had worked at Major League Baseball headquarters in New York at the same time as Alderson had and knew him from there, but it was still an odd transition, going from interviewing him for the Mets job, as acting general manager, to working with him. “In the early months we’d go out to dinner and I’d pick up the check, because I had the credit card,” Ricco says. “I was doing all the budgets. I was signing his expense reports.”

  As with every other aspect of the team, Alderson’s experiment in stockpiling so much brainpower in the front office hinged on what the players did on the field. If the team failed in Alderson’s bid to return it to championship form, then Alderson and his brain trust would clearly take the heat. Having three general managers in their own right, all working together, helped guard against arrogance.

  “One of the very first steps is acknowledging how little we know and how limited our ability is to predict the future,” DePodesta told me. “We’re talking about human beings playing baseball and we’re talking about situations that those human beings may never have encountered before. A big part of our jobs is getting our arms around that uncertainty so we can make calculated decisions even in that atmosphere. It’s not unlike playing blackjack: You never have all the information, but to the extent we can take a framework to have an idea that one decision would be better than the other, that’s what we strive for. But we still know that the future is fundamentally unknowable—and the use of metrics needs to have that in mind.”

  10

  THE MADOFF MESS

  The 2011 Mets season, Alderson’s first with the team, played out against the depressing backdrop of the Bernie Madoff scandal. When the whole thing blew up in December 2008, with Madoff being arrested, the Wilpon family investments with Madoff reportedly totaled half a billion dollars. That money was gone. The Wilpon family had been averaging a return of around 10 percent, some of which they could invest in the Mets. Suddenly that cash flow was gone as well. Early coverage of the scandal focused on how the Wilpons, along with other wealthy clients of Madoff’s, had been duped by the scheme, and how losses incurred through Madoff’s malfeasance could make it difficult for Fred Wilpon to handle the debt he incurred when he bought out Nelson Doubleday Jr. in 2002 to become the club’s principal owner. The scandal percolated in the press for the next two years and, from a Mets standpoint, began to look more ominous soon after Sandy Alderson was hired as GM in late October 2010.

  If Alderson had been president of the Mets, his former role in Oakland, he would have been neck-deep in dealing with the fallout and its financial repercussions for the Wilpons and the Mets. As it was, he was only the general manager. His job was heading up the baseball operations staff. “The nice thing about being involved in just the baseball end is that I can separate myself from the Madoff situation by just being direct and honest with people and saying, ‘OK, I knew about Madoff, I knew the Mets owners had lost money with Madoff,’” Alderson told me in 2011. “I can’t have any credibility with the public if they think I’m a shill for Fred, Saul, and Jeff. I think that’s why they brought me in here in the first place, because I had some independent credibility. I wasn’t goi
ng to come here as a ‘Yes man.’ On the other hand, they own the team, and I respect that.”

  By February 2011 the heat had turned up considerably, with a billion-dollar lawsuit by the trustee of Madoff’s victims accusing the Wilpons and partner Saul Katz of looking the other way when they should have known better. As the owners went from sharply ruling out a sale of the team to announcing they were seeking additional minority investors, it became clear that the Mets would have significantly less money to spend on payroll. The prospect of an ­extended—and expensive—court fight that could push the Mets’ financial outlook deeper into trouble had many around the team queasy. Team finances were so shaky, Bud Selig had to bail out his old friend, and it became public in February 2011 that in November 2010 Major League Baseball had extended the Mets’ ownership a $25 million short-term loan.

  “It was definitely something that hung over the franchise,” Alderson says. “The uncertainty of active litigation, stories being written frequently about the merits of the case, where it was ­procedurally—all of it was a big distraction. The team on the field, the team that was being put together in the offseason, was secondary to the conversation about Madoff.”

  As New York Times columnist George Vecsey put it to me during this period, “The franchise now has its own curse of Babe Ruth, the curse of Bernie Madoff. The fun hasn’t survived for the Mets. The fun is long gone. Alderson is coming in after the party is over and he’s had to kind of open the windows and hose it down. In a way I feel sorry for him.”

  The financial repercussions of the Madoff scandal were enough of a blow to the franchise’s fortunes, but this being the Mets, a team that had all too often in its brief history been the target of derisive humor, the ridicule factor was also devastating. In fact, this was one area in which the team was probably without peer. In the fifty-three years since the Mets were born, even in the periods when they’ve fielded a strong team, they had been the butt of more jokes, gibes, and sarcastic laments than any team in baseball, more so even than the “lovable loser” Chicago Cubs. Being a Mets fan meant caring so much, you shrugged off the jokes and the losing seasons; the very words “Mets fan” at times sounded like a punch line.

  What was it about the Mets that inspired such an unrelenting supply of gallows humor? The Mets, after all, twice won the World Series—the Miracle Mets of ’69 and the thank-you-Bill-Buckner Mets of ’86—not a great record, but nowhere near the worst in baseball. The Pirates, Marlins, Tigers, Twins, Blue Jays, and Phillies have all won two, same as the Mets, during the lifetime of the Metropolitans. Five teams have won fewer. If only the Mets could see themselves as just another team, free to rise or fall like any other club, their record of accomplishment would balance between infamy and glory, fan heartbreak and fan rapture, as in so many other marketplaces, but that of course has never been the case.

  “We’re the punch line in a lot of jokes because we’re viewed, and rightfully so, as kind of the little brother in the city with the Yankees,” David Wright told me. “There’s not too many teams that could compete both on the field and with the aura of the Yankees. You could put any team you wanted in New York and they wouldn’t be able to live up to the history or the accomplishments that the Yankees have. But deep down I think that this is a National League city. There’s just a different feel and a different kind of blue-collar enthusiasm that this city has for the underdogs, and in many ways we’re viewed as that. I think deep down inside this city yearns for a National League team, the New York Mets, to do well for a number of reasons, and one is probably for all the Mets fans out there to finally be able to stick their finger in the Yankees fans’ faces and give them the bragging rights for that period of time.”

  The Mets’ very colors are emblematic of pain: orange for the heartbreak of losing the New York Giants to the heathens out on the coast, blue for the heartbreak of losing the Brooklyn Dodgers to the heathens out in La-La Land. From day one the Mets were a weirdly conceived exercise in franchise as citywide therapy, except shattered innocence can’t be glued back together again. “Once we had Ebbets Field and a way of life,” Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote in his 1963 book Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? He later added, “This is why the New York Mets come out as something more than a baseball team as far as an awful lot of people are concerned. The Mets are a part of life. You can start keeping track of time with them. They are not going to move for money.”

  There was something oddly thrilling about the Mets’ complete break with mediocrity in 1962, their inaugural year. It takes real distinction to finish a season 40-120. Only the nineteenth-century Cleveland Spiders lost more games in a season (20-134 in 1899) and no team since the Boston Braves in 1935 finished a year with fewer victories. With manager Casey Stengel and players like Choo Choo Coleman, Richie Ashburn, and Marv Throneberry, these Mets were never dull. “Nobody wants to be a laughingstock, but the fact is the Mets were fun and it was a New York thing and they were a product of people they hired, Casey and Marvelous Marv and Ashburn,” remembers Vecsey, then a young reporter covering the team for Newsday. “It was so much freaking fun in ’62. The Yankees were still hard-ass and stuffy.”

  More than anything, it was the crosstown presence of the imperial Yankees that tended to unnerve the Mets and their fans, though in good times it was fun having the Yankees as a foil. When the Mets picked Tom Seaver’s name out of a hat, winning a three-way lottery to see which team could claim the young Californian, and Seaver went from 1967 Rookie of the Year to the foundation of the ’69 team, it was easy to tune out the mediocrity in the Bronx. Those Mets also featured another exciting young pitcher, drafted in the twelfth round of the 1965 draft out of Refugio, Texas, a hard-throwing righthander by the name of Nolan Ryan.

  For all the Mets’ futility in their early years of existence—and they lost a hundred games or more in five of their first seven ­seasons—their first big break came during secret meetings of ­National League owners, when a separate National League East division was established, starting in 1969, making a spot in the playoffs more attainable. Through ten games, the ’69 Mets were mucking along at 3-7, ­following 11–3 and 4–0 drubbings by the Pirates. Late May saw the Mets run their losing streak to five with a 3–2 loss to the expansion San Diego Padres before a desultory crowd of 11,772 at Shea Stadium, dropping their record to 18-23. It looked like yet another season was leaking oil fast. Then the next night they caught a break in the eleventh inning: Bud Harrelson’s ball down the third-base line was called fair, Cleon Jones came in to score, and the Mets had a 1–0 win.

  The extra-inning win was a turning point. The Mets then swept both the Giants and Dodgers in three-game series at Shea to run their winning streak to seven games, capping a 7-1 homestand that was the best in the Mets’ short history. Out on the coast, the Mets took three more from the Padres in San Diego with their ace, Tom Seaver, pushing his record to 9-3. “The New York Invincibles, once known as mere Mets, made it ten straight victories today in their newly accustomed fashion, as they defeated the San Diego Padres, 3–2, with a two-run burst in the eighth inning,” Leonard Koppett wrote in the Times after the final game in San Diego.

  The win streak reached eleven before the Mets faltered against Gaylord Perry and the Giants at Candlestick Park, but by then the team was on a roll that would not be stopped all season. Seaver, just twenty-four that year, would pile up twenty-five victories on the way to his first Cy Young Award. Left fielder Cleon Jones batted .340 with sixty-four walks for a .422 on-base percentage, and center fielder Tommie Agee had a team-high twenty-six homers, but no Met had as many as eighty RBIs. Even as they piled up victories over the course of the summer, no one could figure out how they had ground out so many wins. How unbelievable a season was it for the Mets? The Chicago Cubs were in first place in the newly formed National League East Division on September 2 with an 84-52 record and were still five games ahead of the second-place Mets. But the Mets finished the season on a 23-7 roll, compared to
a wretched 8-17 close for the Cubs, to finish the regular season in first place by eight games.

  The giddy sense of disbelief only escalated when the Mets stunned the Braves in the first National League Championship Series, sweeping them in three games with an average of nine runs scored per game. The winning pitcher in Game 3 was twenty-two-year-old Nolan Ryan, who came on in relief in the third inning. Henry Aaron already had a homer and double in the game at that point, but Ryan held him to two pop-ups. In the World Series the Mets had to face a Baltimore Orioles team full of established stars like Boog Powell, Frank Robinson, and Brooks Robinson that came into the Series 8-to-5 favorites after having won 109 games in the regular season. Manager Earl Weaver said, “Bring on the Mets!” and indeed in Game 1, with Tom Seaver matched up against Baltimore’s Mike Cuellar, the Mets lost—but then they came back to win the next four in a row.

  The Payson family, original owners of the Mets, sold the team in January 1980 for $21.1 million, a record at the time, to a group headed up by majority investor Nelson Doubleday Jr., the book publisher. Fred Wilpon, a real-estate developer and boyhood friend of Sandy Koufax’s, came in as a minority investor and CEO and president of the club. The new owners hired Frank Cashen as general manager and he scored some immediate coups, drafting Darryl Strawberry in the first round in 1980 and Dwight Gooden in the first round in 1982, along with supporting players like center fielder Lenny Dykstra in 1981. Cashen also pulled off some big trades, sending Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey to the Cardinals in June 1983 for first baseman Keith Hernandez, who had won both the NL batting title and MVP award in 1979, and on December 10, 1984, trading Hubie Brooks, Mike Fitzgerald, Herm Winningham, and Floyd Youmans to Montreal for catcher Gary Carter, already a seven-time All-Star at that point. The Mets were twelve games over .500 in ’84, their first winning season since 1976, and improved to 98-64 in ’85, but still finished second in the NL East.