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  If the ’69 Mets were an amazement, the ’86 team was simply a powerhouse. They rattled off an eleven-game winning streak in April with an 8–1 win over the Braves in Atlanta that featured a 5-for-5 day from Strawberry and Gooden’s fourth win of the season against no losses, and after that 13-3 start they just kept piling on the wins. Their 108-win regular season put them in rare company. In big-league history, only six times to that point, and twice since, has a team amassed more regular-season wins.

  What tends to get lost about the 1986 World Series is that Bill Buckner’s famous through-the-wickets error took place in Game 6. The Mets, having lost the first two games of the Series at home, had come back with two wins at Fenway to even the Series, then lost Game 5 in Boston and were two runs down and one out away from elimination in the bottom of the tenth inning with the bases empty. Gary Carter, Kevin Mitchell, and Ray Knight strung together three singles against Calvin Schiraldi to make it a one-run game and send Mitchell to third. Bob Stanley came in to pitch and promptly uncorked a wild pitch to score Mitchell and send Knight to second base. Only then did Mookie Wilson hit a spinning grounder to the right side of the infield that Buckner, almost visibly wincing as he crouched after the ball, was unable to field.

  For all the lamenting in New England, all the talk of the Curse of the Bambino, there was one game left to be played. The Red Sox had already taken two from the Mets at home, and all they had to do was win Game 7 at Shea to win the Series—and in fact, Ron Darling gave up back-to-back solo shots in the top of the second inning and Boston added a run on Wade Boggs’ RBI single to take a 3–0 lead that held up through five innings. Finally in the bottom of the sixth, the Mets tied it up on Keith Hernandez’s bases-loaded single and Gary Carter’s RBI groundout, and in the seventh the Red Sox had no choice but to go again with Schiraldi, the previous night’s loser, who gave up a solo shot to Ray Knight that gave the Mets their first lead of the night. The sight of Jesse Orosco out on the mound, throwing his glove in the air after the last out of the 8–5 victory, will always stay with Mets fans.

  In the all-important area of New York bragging rights, the Mets had nine years to enjoy the sweet taste of ’86. The Yankees finished fourth in the AL East in ’87 and fifth in ’88 and ’89, all the while Steinbrenner going through managers like Liz Taylor through husbands. By 1990 the Yankees were a truly bad team, finishing 67-95 under managers Bucky Dent and Stump Merrill, and did not have a winning season until 1993, under Buck Showalter. They won their division in the strike-shortened ’94 season and then in 1996 won the World Series again, starting an incredible run under manager Joe Torre.

  Given all the great Yankees teams of the past, the Torre-era run of dominance vaulted the Yankees to an entirely different realm, one that left the Mets all the more in their shadow, especially after the 2000 Subway Series. The Mets had won ninety-four games that season under manager Bobby Valentine, compared with eighty-seven for the Yankees, but went down meekly in the World Series, winning only one game. Up at Yankee Stadium for Game 1, the Mets took a 3–2 lead in the seventh, but the Yankees tied it in the bottom of the ninth and won in the twelfth. The next night came the bizarre spectacle of Yankees starter Roger Clemens, amped up on some combination of adrenaline, amphetamines, and steroids, moving in after he broke Mike Piazza’s bat and throwing a fragment of the splintered bat at Piazza as he ran down the line toward first. Piazza’s bewilderment was understandable. Clemens never has given a decent explanation for what happened. The Mets were down 6–0 going into the ninth inning of that game and mounted a five-run rally in the ninth, but fell one run short and found themselves down 0-2 in the Series. The near-miss theme continued when, in Game 5, Piazza came up in the ninth against closer Mariano Rivera and belted a drive to deep center field that looked like it was going to be a game-tying homer, but the ball didn’t carry, and the Yankees had their fourth World Series title in five years.

  The Mets did not have a lot of highlights in the coming years and lacked a clear sense of direction. There’s an old rule in politics that says the voters, in choosing a president, often tend to overcompensate, like women seeking men as different as possible from their ex-husbands. The Mets did this with managers, deciding after six years with Bobby Valentine as skipper that they wanted someone as unlike him as possible. Whereas Bobby V loved to cultivate friends and contacts in the media and could be impulsive, the Mets figured that Art Howe, having won more than a hundred games each of his last two seasons managing the A’s, would be the anti-Valentine in just the ways they wanted and would bring a winning tradition. Howe was startled to find when he joined the Mets for the 2003 season how much sourness surrounded the team.

  The Mets’ big offseason acquisition was left-hander Tom Glavine, who pitched Opening Day at Shea Stadium. Unfortunately, it was a few degrees above freezing that day. “They booed Armando Benitez and Roger Cedeño that day when they lined up along the base lines before the game had even started,” Howe told me. “The fans weren’t real happy with the team. Tom was one of the best pitchers in baseball, but he was a finesse guy who needed to feel the ball. It was so cold, it was like a cue ball. He got knocked around. I know it was probably the first time Tom was ever booed on a baseball field when he walked off the field that day.” Glavine was pummeled for four runs in the first inning, the Mets lost 15–2, and the punishing headlines the next day in effect declared the season over.

  Steve Phillips, the GM who hired Howe, was fired that June 12 when the Mets got off to a 29-35 start. Jim Duquette handled the job for a while, and then starting in late 2004 it was time for Omar Minaya, their former assistant GM, to get a shot. Minaya came in on a mission to mix it up with plenty of high-profile deals and also to work in more Latin players if he thought it would help the Mets win. His philosophy of trying to acquire as many gifted athletes as he could was essentially the opposite of the Moneyball approach. There was no question that he knew talent—he even said Ozzie Guillén could be a successful major-league manager when Guillén was still playing—and he built the Mets into a contender, starting with some splashy moves. He signed three-time Cy Young Award–winner Pedro Martinez to a four-year, $53 million deal in late 2004, just months after he took over, a move that was like a lightning bolt, making the Mets look formidable again, and hired Willie Randolph to take over when Howe was let go after two disappointing seasons.

  Shortstop Jose Reyes made his big-league debut in 2003, the day before his twentieth birthday, and by 2005 he was a full-fledged phenomenon. Reyes was the rare player in the Rickey Henderson mold who could lead off, hit for power, and make things happen on the base paths, doing it all with a grin that made everyone feel good. He had a league-leading seventeen triples in 2005 and every single one felt like an event. His running was so explosive, so beautiful to see, as he’d fly around second on his way to a stand-up three-bagger. Never had such speed looked so easy. Reyes also led the league in stolen bases in 2005 with sixty and ranked fourth in singles with 142.

  Reyes again led the league in triples in 2006 with seventeen, but he also boosted his batting average from .273 to .300 and his on-base percentage from .300 to .354. David Wright, just six months older than Reyes, was putting together his second straight impressive season, finishing with an OPS of .912 for the second year in a row. He had twenty-six homers, 116 RBIs, and a .311 average. Carlos Delgado, acquired from the Florida Marlins in a November 2005 trade, added thirty-eight homers and 114 RBIs, and Carlos Beltrán, signed by the Mets as a free agent before the 2005 season, had forty-one homers, 116 RBIs, and ninety-five walks. This was a team with plenty of power and just enough starting pitching, led by forty-year-old Tom Glavine and thirty-five-year-old Steve Trachsel (both fifteen-game winners that season), to finish 97-65 and face the St. Louis Cardinals in the NLCS, which went to seven games. Wright singled home Beltrán to give the Mets an early 1–0 lead against the Cardinals in Game 7, but St. Louis tied it up in the second. Finally in the ninth, Yadier Molina skied a two-run homer to give the Ca
rds the lead. The Mets loaded the bases in the bottom of the inning and had Beltrán coming up. He worked the count full and then promptly struck out looking, frozen by a wicked Adam Wainwright curveball, and the season ended with him standing there with his bat on his shoulder.

  In 2007 Beltrán, Wright, and Reyes all had strong years, with Carlos Delgado and forty-year-old Moises Alou adding power; left-hander Oliver Pérez, acquired by Minaya in a July 2006 trade, joined John Maine and Glavine to anchor the rotation. The Mets won their first four games, thirty-three of their first fifty, and were 57-43 after 100 games, heading into the last weeks of the season in a commanding position. Their lead over the second-place Phillies stood at seven games on September 12 with only seventeen left to play. They went into a tailspin, but still had a 2½-game lead going into the last week of the season, and had a seven-game homestand against teams with losing records. They lost six of seven to cap off a season-ending collapse that ranked among the worst in baseball history. They won only five of their last seventeen games, and the jeers at Shea when they were eliminated from playoff contention were unrelenting.

  “It hurts,” David Wright told the press afterward. “But at the same time, we did it to ourselves. It’s not like it blindsides us. We gradually let this thing slip away. In all honesty, we didn’t deserve to make the playoffs.” Later he went on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and said he had “nightmares every night” about the collapse, and that probably was not much of an exaggeration.

  Alderson took the job of Mets GM in no small part because he knew how much his father, retired military pilot John Alderson, was ­going to enjoy hanging out at Mets spring-training games. Baseball was a lifelong passion of both men, and it had brought them closer together after Sandy’s mother, Gwenny, died in April 1997. John was a star of his senior softball team in Florida. “Somebody might have said, ‘Taking the Mets job is not a good idea,’” Alderson told me. “I took it in part because I thought my dad would enjoy it. Of all the intangible factors, that was probably the major one.”

  But Sandy’s father never had that chance. In fact, Sandy had only one opportunity to talk with his father about his excitement about the team following the October 29, 2010, press conference in New York announcing him as Mets general manager.

  Sandy had been invited to be the guest of honor in Santo Domingo for the annual celebration of the founding of the Marine Corps on November 10, 1775. The next morning was Veterans Day—and Sandy got a call from his father. “We didn’t talk long. He was excited about the Mets. He was in good spirits,” he says. “He always called me to wish me a happy Veterans Day. If he didn’t call me, I called him.”

  From Santo Domingo Sandy and Linda flew to Puerto Rico to take part in a fundraiser for Carlos Beltrán’s baseball academy in Florida, Puerto Rico, an hour’s drive from San Juan. Back at the hotel that night, it was long past midnight when the phone in the Aldersons’ hotel room rang. It was Sandy’s sister Kristy calling from Florida with horrible news.

  “That was the night my dad was killed,” Alderson told me. “Emotionally it was a huge blow, as you can imagine.”

  John Alderson had been crossing Fourth Street, a six-lane thoroughfare a few miles from his home in St. Petersburg, Florida, when he was struck by a car and killed. John was eighty-seven, but he was still playing softball three times a week in a senior league. Jim Brice, general manager at Harvey’s 4th Street Grill, said he and John got to be good friends and would often head to a hamburger joint called El Cap, a little redbrick corner place with a white-on-red neon sign out front. That’s where John Alderson went on the night of November 12 to watch sports with friends.

  “Somebody else had driven from home,” Sandy says. “He got in an argument with somebody and just kind of left in a huff and decided to walk home. It’s quite a walk, actually, but it was something he could do. He was in great shape. And he got hit crossing the street.”

  The question for Alderson in 2011 was how much the new realities for the Mets would interfere with signing Jose Reyes to a new deal. Reyes and his agent said in June of that year they wouldn’t talk contract until after the season. In July the Mets traded Beltrán to the Giants for Zack Wheeler. In August came a federal appeals court decision that opened the door to the possibility that Wilpon and Katz would have to pay back as much as $300 million. “Immediately after the Madoff litigation was made public, I realized that was going to have some impact on what we were going to be able to do,” Alderson says now.

  Also complicating the Reyes picture was the injury issue. Balky legs were always a concern with Reyes, a particularly glaring concern for a player whose game relied so heavily on speed and whose mobility was likely to decline with age anyway. He was limited to just thirty-six games in 2009, and injuries took him out of action regularly in 2010 and 2011 as well. That was bad for the Mets—and might give other teams pause before throwing a lot of money at him.

  “It should have, but you never know,” Alderson told me in September 2011. “It only takes one team. But you have to recognize that signing Jose is not an end in itself. Maybe we play well with Jose. Maybe not. We have a payroll this year when everything is said and done that is roughly $140 million. Our bullpen is seven players, which is more than 25 percent of the team, but we’re only paying them about $5 million total. Our bullpen is terrible. It’s killed us. It’s the reason why we’re not going to finish over .500. But if we were to sign Jose, David Wright, and some others, we’d be back in the same boat, spending too little on our bullpen and scraping by with two secondhand catchers. The sad thing is if we sign Jose, we’re just maintaining the status quo. We’re not improving the team.”

  Soon after the season, Alderson would note that the team had lost $70 million that year, a sobering fact. Even for Alderson himself, who came to the Mets expecting to have substantial financial resources, it was not easy to come to terms with the post-Madoff era. Looking back, he said that contrary to Reyes’ comments after the Miami Marlins signed him to a six-year, $106 million contract, the Mets did make a concerted effort to sign him. True, the Mets did not make an official offer, but talking to Reyes’ agent after the season, Alderson made clear that a contract right around $100 million was a possibility.

  “We actually went pretty far to try to sign Jose, further than most people realized,” Alderson says. “We telegraphed our position pretty clearly, but I think what I told them was shopped. The Marlins were opening a new ballpark and were looking to make a splash.”

  The consensus around baseball was that the Marlins had probably overspent. As Tyler Kepner wrote in the Times, “Cutting loose Reyes, at a time when the Mets are hemorrhaging money and unlikely to contend, is probably the right move.” Still, it was jarring, especially when Reyes talked about not feeling wanted by the Mets.

  That Madoff-rocked year for the Mets, there was the whiff in the air of a team that knew it was bleeding and knew for the time being it could not stanch the wound. How much blood would be lost? Would the scandal forever distract from building a winner? The answers finally came the next spring when Wilpon and Katz reached a settlement with Irving Picard, the trustee who had sued them for $300 million. “The Mets owners, in a deal announced Monday, agreed to settle the lawsuit for $162 million and a pledge that Mr. Picard would drop his claims that they were ‘willfully blind’ to signs that Mr. Madoff was carrying out a fraud,” the Wall Street Journal reported on March 20, 2012.

  For Alderson and the Mets’ baseball operations department, it was finally time for a sigh of relief. They did not know how long it would take to overcome the damage to the franchise represented by the Madoff morass, but at least they knew it would get no worse. They also knew that without clear signs of progress, the fans and the media would not tolerate many more losing seasons, Madoff or no Madoff.

  11

  WINTER MEETINGS 2012

  If a hotel called the “Gaylord Opryland” sounds like a punch line, it’s that and much, much more. For all that has changed in basebal
l since Sandy Alderson started attending baseball’s annual winter meetings more than thirty years ago, the Opryland remains, timeless in its callow bad taste. Where to begin? Just inside the reception area, the almost understated elegance of a wedding-cake-white low ceiling and balustraded square columns opens up onto a gorgeous tableau of tacky excess. What is that sustained dull roar? Not a man-made waterfall, surely? Indeed not: It’s two fifty-foot-high man-made waterfalls, side by side, bookending an odd slope of shrubby greenery, topped off with a cluster of palm trees looking as fake and out of place as if they’d been pulled from the set of Gilligan’s Island. The waterfall runoff feeds a network of shallow streams patrolled by pellucid carp, with footbridges and faux-gas-lamp-lined pathways in abundance, looking down at giddy agglomerations of fountains, here a starburst-patterned geyser lighted red from below, there an intermittently squirting column filling a gurgling indigo cauldron. The unending inanity of it all springs from some garish amalgam of miniature-golf-course aesthetic and family-fun-era Vegas, the whole spectacle topped off with a glass ceiling (anyone seen Willy Wonka?). The ambience conveyed by such a place runs to the forced and pinched even on good days, but on the regular occasions over the years when the hotel complex hosts baseball’s annual meetings, the mood swings sharply toward the farcical.

  For days on end the raised walkway sloping up from the lobby is clotted with the twitchy, furrowed brows of sportswriters. They stand around hour after hour with nothing to do but worry and wait and swap rumors, an assemblage of humanity resembling nothing so much as the passengers of an airplane suddenly evacuated from a flight because of equipment failure, standing around with the directionless mien of those who would rather be anywhere else but can do nothing about their plight. The good sportswriters find a way to ferret out the occasional scrap of actual information or insight from scouts or midlevel executives they know, but such infusions into this closed ecosystem are passed on dozens of times and soon feel stale. Unlike during Alderson’s first winter meetings in the 1980s, when reporters waited for the adrenaline-rush inevitability of deadlines so they could get bombed in one of the many bars on the premises, nowadays the need to tweet turns many or most into prim teetotalers, thumbs kept ever at the ready, primed to unleash such vital communiqués as “Four-team trade brewing.” It used to be that the posturing of the sportswriting fraternity hinged on such clichés of road life as capacity for prodigious late-night drunkenness, ballplayer-like devotion to tales of fictional or actual hookups, and now and then an old-fashioned scoop, but these days it’s all about numbers: How many thousands of Twitter followers do you have? Whose gnomic news flashes get retweeted the most? Who has statistically proven influence and the plump salaries it brings? Danny Knobler, a former Tigers beat writer for Booth Newspapers who had moved on to CBSSports.com, told me on my first night in the echo of the waterfalls (“What?”) that he’d heard of a paper that actually tried to determine sportswriter salary based on the number of hits an article received.