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  The winter meetings broke up with no resolution on the Dickey question, which meant the negative press could not be long in coming. Deadspin checked in on December 11 with an article the mets are lowballing r.a. dickey while he works their christmas party. The article cited as an affront the idea that the Mets had offered Dickey a two-year contract extension worth $20 million, compared with the $26 million he was requesting, though it was not clear how many fans at home would consider it an outrageous insult to offer a man $10 million a year to throw a ball.

  “We have beaten the Mets up for so many years over bad business practices—I’ll see your Oliver Pérez and raise you a Luis Castillo—that we should acknowledge how well they are playing the R.A. Dickey negotiations,” Joel Sherman wrote in the New York Post. “Are the Mets lowballing their best and most popular pitcher? Yep. And that’s clearly making Dickey edgy and miserable. But this is a rare moment when the Mets have all the leverage, so why shouldn’t they use it, like the majority of players do when the power swings in the other direction?”

  Among the possible trade partners were the Orioles, who had a top prospect the Mets coveted in righthanded pitcher Dylan Bundy, chosen fourth overall in the 2011 draft. “They toyed with the idea,” Alderson says, “even though he was one of the top five prospects in baseball.”

  Texas was also interested, but not offering enough. The Mets were intrigued by righthanded pitcher Cody Buckel, a second-round pick out of Simi Valley, California, rated the Rangers’ eighth-best prospect. “Had we gotten the players we’d asked for from Texas and made a deal, we would have regretted it,” Alderson told me. Later that season Buckel developed epic control problems, walking twenty-eight batters in just 91/3 innings at Double-A in one stretch.

  Trade talks with the Blue Jays flopped around, pivoting on the Mets’ insistence that they land Toronto’s top prospect, catcher ­Travis d’Arnaud. But the Blue Jays wanted the Mets to take another catcher as well: They had just landed veteran John Buck one month earlier in an eleven-player deal with Miami that sent Jose Reyes to the Blue Jays, and Toronto insisted on unloading Buck and his $6 million salary. He could provide veteran leadership, and his years of experience could be helpful when it came to keeping young pitchers calm and confident. On the other hand, he was a free swinger whose approach was generally at odds with the approach Alderson and the Mets favored. To take on such a player at such a salary, the Mets would need to be compensated.

  “Once we accepted that Buck had to be in the deal, we tried to extract another player from them,” Alderson explains. “That’s how we ended up with the Venezuelan kid.”

  The heart of the deal was d’Arnaud, but the Mets wanted another blue-chip prospect and got one in pitcher Noah Syndergaard, a 2010 first-round pick out of Legacy High in Texas. The “Venezuelan kid” Toronto agreed to throw into the deal was Wuilmer Becerra, eighteen, a shortstop turned outfielder Toronto thought highly enough to pay a $1.3 million signing bonus. The Mets for their part added catchers Josh Thole and Mike Nickeas to the trade, which finally went down December 16. “Like it or not, the Alderson regime has been looking to 2014 and beyond since it took over after the 2010 season, determined to build a contender that will last,” John Harper wrote in the New York Daily News. “And acquiring d’Arnaud should go a long way toward accomplishing that goal.”

  12

  SPRING TRAINING 2013

  More than sixty years after New York writers started celebrating spring training in Florida or Arizona, the quiet rhythms of another season of baseball rejuvenation remain unchanged. Pale-faced fans fresh off planes from the north still mill about the complex with grins plastered on their faces, overjoyed that baseball, at least on this day, at least for them, still provides a mysterious bridge to the raw emotion of youth, the anticipation and hope and freedom from regret. The Mets’ spring-training complex lies near Florida’s Atlantic coast about midway between Orlando and Miami along the edge of a fast-growing suburban sprawl called Port St. Lucie, rather rudely dubbed “Port St. Lousy” or (by a New York Post columnist) “a pathetic waste of map space.” There is no port; in fact Port St. Lucie isn’t even on the coast and has no downtown, but Fort Pierce and its picturesque waterfront fish restaurants are a ten-minute drive away. Sandy Alderson showed up at Tradition Field on the morning of February 23, 2013, nursing an ages-old mixture of anticipation and apprehension. This was the day when Zack Wheeler was ­going to make his spring debut and, as it happened, the Mets regional network had announced that this would be its first game broadcast from spring training.

  “A lot of people will watch because Wheeler’s pitching,” Alderson tells me in his Port St. Lucie office. “Fortunately he’s the kind of guy who I don’t think is going to be fazed too much by it. But command will be an issue.”

  Alderson then had one of those jolts of unfortunate association that are unavoidable for a man with decades in the game. He flashed back on the excitement in A’s camp when another hard-throwing righthander, Todd Van Poppel, was being touted as the next big thing. Alderson drafted Van Poppel out of Martin High School in Texas in the first round of the 1990 draft and signed him to a $1.2 million deal. Van Poppel made his major-league debut in 1991 at age nineteen and was shelled for five runs in 42/3 innings, which proved to be an accurate indication of what was to come. By 1996 the A’s gave up on him and placed him on waivers.

  “I remember this with Todd Van Poppel way back when: OK, here comes the savior,” Alderson said. “It didn’t work out all that well in his case.”

  I asked Alderson if at that point in his career he still got a little nervous going into a key appearance for a promising youngster. He denied it, but I’m not quite sure I believed him. “Listen, if he pitches great, it’s just one game,” he said. “If he pitches poorly, it may be a long spring, but I don’t worry about it.”

  Managing expectations is an art form, as far as it goes. The risk is to taste a little success with spin and think it says more about you than it does. Alderson has a precision with language befitting a man who had three years of Harvard Law, but he’s allergic to out-and-out bullshitting; it bores him silly, and one thing Alderson has never, ever been able to abide is being bored. This is probably a weakness of Alderson’s. Slogging through boredom is often an important skill. But Alderson also turns his aversion to boredom into a strength: He finds ways to keep himself interested with his knack for the biting one-liner, even if in New York so far he’d mostly kept this side of his personality hidden.

  When he moved in 1998 from Northern California to a job working at baseball headquarters in New York City, handed the title of executive vice president of baseball operations, he toned down the wit. He had a little more of the lawyer in him in those years, a little less of the guy in shorts who was always going to play by his own rules. Then he moved to San Diego to take over as CEO of the Padres and, through some quirk of the media market down there, gained a reputation for being disagreeable and remote. That may in part have had to do with the role of CEO, more like being a general, far from the front lines, removed from the daily give-and-take that field managers and even sometimes general managers have with players and media types. His mixed reception in San Diego also had to do with his own missteps, he’s quick to point out.

  “When I was in Oakland I developed a reputation for some humor,” Alderson says. “Then I went to the commissioner’s office and my reputation was more for being direct and unfiltered. Then I went to San Diego and I became a hard-ass.” His appearances on a weekly Padres radio show were often contentious. “I’d basically end up saying, ‘You guys don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I would get into it with callers. I don’t know why. It was stupid.”

  It made sense for Alderson, now in his sixties, to tone it down stepping into the pressure cooker of the New York media market, but at times it seemed as if he was too successful in avoiding his mistakes in San Diego. When Alderson in his Oakland days would go off on someone, it usually made great copy. He was letting
off steam, but there was a message in it, too.

  In November 2012 Alderson showed up in Palm Springs, California, for baseball’s annual GM meetings and let it fly. It did not take remarkable skill at filling in the dots to hear anger in jokes like this one about Lucas Duda, a Mets prospect who was said to have broken a bone that offseason moving furniture around his apartment: “We like Duda, although he does come with a lot of furniture.”

  This was a period of time when, improbably enough, the Mets were talking about going into the season with an outfield of whomever they could scrounge up off the baseball scrap heap in right field, unproven Kirk Nieuwenhuis in center, and Duda, whose competence was limited to handling first-base duties, in left field.

  “Outfield? What outfield?” Alderson retorted in Palm Springs.

  The comment was funny because it sounded like something Alderson would say behind the scenes to Ricciardi or DePodesta, even as they scoured the options to improve the situation. That November there had been much speculation about the Mets signing Michael Bourn, a center fielder who had posted a .348 on-base percentage with some power the year before for the Braves. The trouble was, depending on how the rules were interpreted, the Mets would have had to give up a draft pick as compensation for signing Bourn; they mulled challenging the rules, and probably would have if Bourn had not insisted on a four-year deal, but in the end the Mets passed. Instead, they kept looking—and took a chance on outfielder Marlon Byrd, a former All-Star for the Cubs in 2010 whose 2012 season was disastrous, featuring both career-low numbers (a .210 average with just a .245 slugging percentage) and a fifty-game suspension for testing positive for a banned substance. The February 1 announcement that the Mets had signed Byrd to a minor-league deal did not exactly set off fireworks among the press or fans.

  “The Mets have been looking for outfield help and so far haven’t figured out a way to land Michael Bourn,” the New York Post reported. “But yesterday, they signed Marlon Byrd to a minor-league deal and while he doesn’t have Bourn’s pedigree, he at least brings some baggage.”

  As with all reclamation projects, Byrd was iffy, but no one questioned he had the tools to be a productive hitter if he could get his career back on track, and there were inklings of character, the kind of toughness needed to put a miserable year behind him and rebuild his approach. Tattoos were everywhere in baseball clubhouses by this time, but Byrd had gone out and added a most unusual tattoo to his right arm: Featured there was an excerpt from former president Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech.

  On February 1, the same day they signed Byrd, the Mets also took a chance on forty-year-old reliever LaTroy Hawkins, another move mostly met by yawns. The New York Post sniffed, “Add LaTroy Hawkins to the Mets’ rag-tag bullpen mix… .” The article went on to explore the question of who might close games for the Mets, without hinting that Hawkins had any hope of landing that role, and also not talking about Bobby Parnell, a ninth-round draft pick of the Mets in 2005 who had come into his own in 2012, finishing with an ERA of 2.49 and seven saves, second on the team behind closer Frank Francisco. A major factor in Parnell’s development was the steady advice of veteran closer Jason Isringhausen, who took an active interest. Parnell had hit 103 on the radar gun, but it takes far more than velocity to handle the pressures of late-inning work. Hawkins, if he could make the team, was the kind of solid citizen who had impressed teammates at every stop along the way as levelheaded and professional. Then again, there was no telling what he had left at age forty.

  Mets chief operating officer Jeff Wilpon, looking to find new ways to connect with fans, started encouraging top-level figures in the Mets organization to take to Twitter and mix it up, including Mets PR man Jay Horwitz, who joined the team in 1980. Horwitz was the subject of a hilarious Wall Street Journal article in the spring of 2013 making fun of his prodigious habit of butt-dialing.

  “Several times per week, and sometimes several times per day, Horwitz accidentally calls a current or former member of the organization,” Brian Costa wrote in the Journal. “He has mistakenly awakened team executives at 4 a.m., roused coaches late at night and left former Mets around the league puzzled by missed calls from him. Horwitz may be the Cal Ripken Jr. of public-relations men, hardly ever taking a day off. But he is the Barry Bonds of butt dialers, putting up staggering numbers and shattering all records. By now, his career butt dials number in the thousands. ‘I swear to God, I don’t know how I do it,’ Horwitz said. ‘I’m not real mechanical.’”

  The article attracted such attention, the Today show on NBC did a segment on Horwitz, sending a reporter and crew down to Port St. Lucie to interview Mets players about the team PR man’s ways with the phone. “I’ve been butt-dialed probably close to around 150 times,” explained a smiling Ike Davis.

  Later Horwitz switched to an iPhone, which did put an end to the butt-dialing, but created new issues. “I don’t hang up, but think I have,” he told me. “Sometimes people hear me talking about them and sometimes I’m saying not nice things about them.”

  Horwitz checked in with his first tweet in January 2012: “Joined the twitter world. My dog Tiki and cats Leo, Stan and Lilly can’t wait 34 years from Doug Flynn to David Wright. I am old.” The new medium brought out a puckish side to Horwitz’s sense of humor. Soon he was tweeting “I once went through 79 cans of whiteout in one year. Still a pr record” and “My cat Leo is speechless.”

  Horwitz, sixty-seven by then, had been with the team so long, the Times did a feature on his new pursuit of Twitter, Andrew Keh writing, “Despite his early hesitation, Horwitz has taken Wilpon’s directive and run with it. The quintessential Horwitz post takes a behind-the-scenes Mets story from long ago, wraps it inside a tone of self-deprecation, and blemishes it with at least one glaring typo.”

  By February, Horwitz was mixing in more pictures with his tweets. On February 6 he posted a shot of the palm trees outside Legends Field and wrote, “In St. Lucie. Going to beach. Please don’t tell Sandy.”

  Alderson joined Twitter that same month and sent his first tweet on February 9: “Getting ready for Spring Training—Driving to FL but haven’t left yet. Big fundraiser tonight for gas money. Also exploring PAC contribution.”

  Three days later, he followed up with: “Will have to drive carefully on trip; Mets only reimburse for gas at a downhill rate. Will try to coast all the way to FL.”

  The tweets, coming as they did at a time when Mets finances were a grim subject, might have been too much for some. A New Yorker blog post that spring by Seth Berkman mentioned the tweets and asserted, “But no one expected the opening salvo to come from Mets general manager Sandy Alderson, a man usually characterized as a no-nonsense numbers cruncher.”

  “People don’t understand: He’s funny,” David Wright told me. “He got a lot of backlash on Twitter for some of the things he said. Like I said, I love this organization. I bleed blue and orange. But I was cracking up.”

  Like the tweet about gas money?

  “Uh-huh. I think he’s hilarious in a dry sense. You can tell when he’s ready to crack one because he kind of gets this little smirk on his face before he says it. He’s got a good sense of humor. I wish more people could see that side of him, but I guess you can’t really, because he’s got to come off as this kind of stoic leader, general manager.”

  It all circled back to developments on the field: If the Mets continued to struggle on Alderson’s watch, not too many Mets fans or reporters were going to want to laugh at his jokes.

  One afternoon early in spring training 2013, prospect Travis d’Arnaud was catching at Tradition Field. Everyone was eager to get a look at him in action so soon after the trade that brought him to the Mets the previous December. He had a puppy-doggish look as he hopped up to confer with the pitcher. A fly ball to left sent the outfielder back toward the fence and d’Arnaud shouted out, “You got room!”

  “To me he just looks like he’s not having fun right now,” Alderson told me. “He’s feeling the
pressure. He’s swinging at bad balls. The first pitch went off his shin guard. Right now he knows he’s this top prospect and either he’s overcompensating, trying not to be Johnny College, or something else. We’ve got plenty of time to figure that out.”

  It was another perfect 86-degree Florida spring afternoon and Alderson was incognito in his white cotton golf shirt and shades, sitting with his posse of smart young men. Behind him was Adam Fisher, the director of baseball operations; Jon Miller, the director of minor-league operations; and DePodesta.

  “Adam’s from Harvard, Paul’s from Harvard, Jon Miller is from Princeton,” Alderson told me later. “They replicate themselves.”

  The key to the Mets’ future was development of talent, starting with Zack Wheeler. “He hasn’t done anything to disappoint us,” Alderson said on the morning of Wheeler’s spring debut. “Prospect status is a function of past evaluations and past performance. It’s a dynamic label. Once you get it, you’re not entitled to it forever. You’ve got to keep performing. Zack has kept performing and he’s moved up the list of top prospects across baseball.

  “He’s kind of laid-back. He tries to maintain his sort of low-key, low-anxiety approach to things. The contrast is with a guy like Matt Harvey. He’s very outgoing, he’s always asking questions, he wants to be part of the group, he’s a joiner. I think Zack is a little more of a loner. Harvey is a very mature twenty-three years old, very self-confident. Wheeler I don’t think thinks about what he projects, whereas with Harvey there’s a little more posturing that goes on. They’re both good guys.”

  Alderson took a break from talking about the future to take his dog, Buddy, outside. As soon as we got out into the parking lot, Buddy took advantage of the opportunity. Alderson pulled a little plastic bag out of his pocket and went over to clean up. As Alderson squatted down with his baggie, a friendly voice called out in the near distance.

  “Hey, that’ll be a good tweet for Jay!”