Baseball Maverick Page 2

  One of the keys to deal-making is not to come across as too eager. “These baseball deals travel at their own pace and I always try to be careful about how I try to market the players,” Alderson says. “One of my beliefs is that if I do all of the calling, eventually the value of the player gets discounted. One of the ways you really learn about people’s motivation is when they call you. But there has to be a balance.”

  The Mets had a road trip to California that July just before the All-Star break and took three of four from the Dodgers at Chavez Ravine before closing out the first half of the season with three games against the Giants at their ballpark by the Bay. Beltrán went 3-for-5 in the series opener to help the Mets win, and the Giants made the unusual move of offering Beltrán a ride to the All-Star Game after the series. As John Shea reported after the game in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Carlos Beltrán will be taking Air Bochy to Phoenix for the All-Star Game, and along the way he’ll mingle with the Giants’ All-Star contingent, which includes four pitchers, an entire coaching staff and manager Bruce Bochy.” Shea, a veteran writer, came close to openly campaigning for the Giants to deal with the Mets: “Beltrán is among the marquee names in the rumor mill and exactly what the Giants would love—a middle-of-the-order switch-hitter with pop and a willingness to waive his no-trade clause to join a contender.”

  Alderson laughs looking back on the charter-plane episode. A furious round of speculation erupted in the press that the Mets were foolish to accept the offer and have Beltrán take that flight down to Phoenix with the Giants. Insinuations were made that the Giants were pulling a fast one on the Mets and that Alderson was letting himself “be had.”

  “I said, ‘These guys think that this is really going to help them?’” Alderson recalls. “It’s really helping us.”

  Both the media and the Giants would warm to the idea of a trade, the more they got to see of Beltrán. “The Giants are going to get infatuated with the idea that they can get Carlos Beltrán, who is going to the All-Star Game. It was almost like a baited hook. From my standpoint, let him get on the plane, let him get cozy with the Giants.”

  The pas de deux between Alderson and his Giants counterpart, Brian Sabean, had been traipsing along through its choreographed steps for weeks. Sabean did not call Alderson and Alderson did not call Sabean. The flickers of mutual interest found other expression. The Giants’ longtime vice president of player personnel, Dick Tidrow, a former relief pitcher for the Yankees and Mets, called up J. P. Ricciardi, the former Blue Jays general manager, now working as a special assistant to Alderson with the Mets, and let it be known there was interest in getting Beltrán. Obviously, Ricciardi would pass that on to Alderson.

  But eventually Sabean did call and leave a message on Alderson’s cell phone saying the Giants were sincerely interested in Beltrán. Soon after the All-Star Game, Alderson called Sabean directly to talk about a deal.

  The Giants’ three top prospects were outfielder Gary Brown, first baseman Brandon Belt, and pitcher Zack Wheeler. Alderson made clear the Mets would need one of those three prospects at the very least to move Beltrán. Alderson was just sure that, loaded with talented young pitching as they were, the Giants were more likely to agree to deal their blue-chip pitching prospect, Wheeler, who was only at Single-A that year, than either Brown or Belt. Still, the Mets were intrigued by Belt, a Giants fifth-round pick in 2009, who batted an impressive .383 for the San Jose Giants in 2010 with an on-base percentage of .492 and a slugging percentage of .628. His 2011 numbers in San Jose were even better. “Belt had such a terrific record and he was so close to the big leagues, you had to think about asking for him,” Alderson remembers. “But when I called Brian, he said, ‘Yeah, we’re very interested and we’d consider Wheeler.’”

  “Well,” Alderson told him. “We’ve got to get something else, too.”

  “It would be tough for us to do anything else,” Sabean replied. “But I’ve got ownership here, I’ve got everybody together, so I’ll be able to give you an answer pretty quickly.”

  “Would you consider Belt?” Alderson asked.

  “No,” he was told.

  The call took all of five minutes, because both Alderson and Sabean like to get straight to the point. “Brian’s a man of few words,” Alderson says. Asking for Belt was, Alderson explains, “partly tactical,” though if he’d been surprised and the Giants had been willing to part with him, the Mets would have been happy.

  In the Bay Area, many were high on Beltrán but leery of paying too high a price. Wrote Tim Kawakami in the San Jose Mercury News, “There’s no way they should give up Brandon Belt or Zack Wheeler in such a deal.” This was more than a week before the trade deadline and these things tended to have a momentum of their own, but Alderson was thinking: “Why not do the deal a week early?” Even in five minutes, Sabean and Alderson had time to go over some details of compensation; Alderson said that even if they pulled the trigger on a deal right away, the Mets would pick up all of Beltrán’s salary—about $100,000 per game—for the days up until the trade deadline and the two teams would share Beltrán’s compensation for the rest of the season. As much as the Mets were having to look for ways to save money, they were ready to make a sizable outlay to move Beltrán for the right prospect.

  The Mets continued to size up trade possibilities with other teams, but Alderson had heard real purpose in Sabean’s voice and had been assured the Giants general manager would call him right back.

  “I didn’t hear from him,” Alderson says. “That’s never a good sign.”

  There weren’t many other players out there the Giants could pursue to add offense down the stretch run, which was why they were so interested in Beltrán. Alderson knew another possibility was Astros outfielder Hunter Pence, an All-Star in 2009 and 2011 who was hitting better than .300.

  Alderson finally called Sabean to ask what was up.

  “We just can’t do that deal,” the Giants GM said. “We’re not prepared to part with Wheeler.”

  Alderson thought the Giants’ hesitation had to do with Pence, so he called the Houston Astros directly to get a bead on the situation.

  “Hey, we may trade Beltrán,” Alderson told his counterpart with the Astros, Ed Wade. “But if we do, we might have an interest in Pence as a guy we could hold on to for more than one year.”

  Sounds logical enough, doesn’t it?

  “We had absolutely no interest in Pence, but we were trying to engage in a dialogue so we at least had some intelligence,” Alderson recalls. “So we told Houston, ‘OK, we’ll keep you in mind, we’ll talk tomorrow.’ The upshot was that the Astros went back and forth. I finally got a call from Ed saying they were not going to trade Pence, which they knew was good for us because it made Beltrán the only guy on the market. Later they reconsidered and decided that if they got a good deal, they were going to trade Pence. I had the information I was looking for, which was that Pence was on the market.”

  Zack Wheeler loved being part of the San Francisco Giants organization. To be a highly touted Giants pitching prospect in those years was to have the feeling of standing on a conveyor belt pulling you inexorably toward stardom and, who knew, maybe a ­Cy Young Award or two. The Giants tabbed Tim Lincecum with their 2006 first-round pick; he hopscotched through the system and by 2008 was winning the first of back-to-back Cy Youngs. In 2009 the Giants used their first-round pick on Wheeler, taking him sixth overall a week and a half after his nineteenth birthday.

  Wheeler and Lincecum could not have been more different in personal style; Wheeler is as likely to grow his hair out to ponytail length or visit the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, California, as he is to ride a magic carpet over the Manhattan skyline. Yet out on the mound, talent feeds talent, and the example of little Tim Lincecum pitching his ass off start after start in the black and orange, snapping off pitches that earned blank, bewildered stares from hitters, inspired a young pitcher like Wheeler. Hard-throwing Matt Cain, the Giants’ first-round pick
in 2002, made his major-league debut by late 2005 and was selected to the All-Star team by 2009. The Giants nabbed Madison Bumgarner, a big lefty with a distinctive slinging pitching motion, tenth overall in the 2007 draft and in 2010 he became the fourth-youngest starter in baseball history to win a World Series game, leading the Giants to a Game 4 victory by pitching eight shutout innings against an explosive Texas Rangers lineup. Later on, he would pitch his way into the record books with his jaw-dropping performance leading the Giants to victory in the 2014 World Series.

  Wheeler’s first A-ball assignment was to the Augusta GreenJackets of the South Atlantic League, three hours from Dallas, Georgia, where he’d grown up and most of his close-knit family still lived, including his parents and his older brother Jacob, who often got to see Zack pitch that year for Augusta. “The initial excitement for the family was, ‘Hey, he got drafted in the first round,’” Jacob says. “A couple days go by and you start to hear about the organization and who they drafted the last few years. You realize it means a lot that the Giants drafted you.”

  Zack’s two older brothers were seven and nine years older than him. Zack didn’t have a real growth spurt until he was thirteen years old, so for many years he was always the little pipsqueak trying to keep up with the gifted athletes who towered over him. “We played some video games, but we were always out in the street playing basketball or baseball until dark and then we’d turn the lights on,” Adam Wheeler says. “At that age, before he was ten, Zack was out there, trying to be as good as we were.”

  Adam, also a hard-throwing righthander, was drafted by the Yankees in the thirteenth round of the 2001 draft and spent four years working his way through the system, including a promising season with the Staten Island Yankees in 2003, appearing in fourteen games and finishing with a 1.80 ERA. But the next season he pitched in only five games, his career cut short by a torn labrum in his shoulder.

  Being the youngest in the family helped Zack get over himself. Former teammates describe him as down-to-earth and modest. Catcher Alex Burg, drafted by the Giants the same year as Wheeler, met him in Scottsdale soon after Zack flew out for his physical. “Usually the first-rounders are a little arrogant, a little full of themselves,” Burg told me. “He just wasn’t that kid at all. He wants to just be Zack. He’s the same guy as the day he signed, regardless of how much money he might be making.”

  The year pitching for the Augusta GreenJackets was not altogether smooth for Wheeler. His first professional start was the kind you try hard to forget: six batters, four walks, three earned runs, and that was that. His second and third starts were rocky as well, then Wheeler bounced back and threw shutout ball in three of his four next starts before landing on the disabled list. He developed an ugly blister underneath the nail on one of the fingers of his pitching hand and was out of action from May 18 to July 9. He finished that first season with thirty-eight walks and seventy strikeouts in 582/3 innings with a 3.99 ERA.

  It’s one of the great puzzles in sports: Which qualities push a future star along the path toward fulfillment of his or her talent while other prospects, also talented, also promising, get off track? Young Zack Wheeler offered a fascinating case study. He had the lanky build of a future big-league pitcher, the explosive fastball and easy athleticism, but at every level on his way up the baseball hierarchy he battled wildness, often throwing pitch after pitch up and out of the strike zone. Something enabled him to look within and continue to find new ways to make himself better. He had none of the ready-made swagger of other young phenoms. He liked to fly under people’s radar. But Wheeler had that quality of many who succeed, a kind of foreknowledge of his own eventual success, a certainty that if he kept working hard, kept learning, kept gaining more of a mental edge, he would get the chance to let his pitches speak for themselves.

  By the time Wheeler arrived in San Jose in 2011 to play for the Giants’ Class A affiliate in the California League, he could feel how close he was. On his first flight into San Jose, he could see the expanse of San Francisco Bay stretching out, framed by green hills that would soon turn a deep shade of hazelnut in the summer heat, and sense how close he was to the Giants’ spectacular ballpark, with its exuberant sellout crowds every night, only forty-five miles away from where Wheeler’s plane touched down. He was not one to boast. That wasn’t his style. For him it was more like being alone with a secret, a secret he shared with his brothers and parents, and the secret was: He knew he was going to be starting and winning games up at that beautiful ballpark on the Bay with its new World Series banner flying.

  Wheeler’s time in San Jose got off to an awkward start. When he showed up at the house of the host family he’d been assigned, the place gave him the creeps. Early on in his stay there Wheeler opened a door and bats came flying out. The shower was just big enough for someone six-foot—Wheeler, at six-foot-four, had to contort himself just to get in there. One time he stepped into the shower and saw a massive spider. “He hates spiders,” Alex Burg says. “He freaked out.”

  “No matter what age they are, they really are kids when you get them,” says Joyce Morgan, who regularly hosts San Jose Giants players along with her husband, Doug. “Zack and Tommy [Joseph] were in a home that had spiders. They were deathly allergic and scared of spiders, so they wanted out of where they were. One of my other players asked if they could come, and I said yes, I’ll open up the house to any of them.”

  The house was on a quiet street with shopping malls nearby and easy access to the 280 and 880 freeways for a quick seven-mile drive over to the stadium where they played their games. “Instead of going to the bars with the players, he’d do other stuff with Tommy Joseph,” Doug Morgan says. “They’d go to the movies instead of going out partying.”

  A generation earlier, the whole valley was given over to orchards, prunes and apricots and cherries. The same gentle baking sun-splashed heat that made the climate perfect for fruit trees also made San Jose Municipal Stadium a picturesque setting for the summer game. The dugouts may be tiny, the place decades past its prime, but the little stadium has been updated with slides and other amusements for the kids and perky signs like this, quoting Tallulah Bankhead: THERE HAVE BEEN ONLY TWO GENIUSES IN THE WORLD, WILLIE MAYS AND WILLIE SHAKESPEARE. The thin air gives passing planes the look of being suspended midair on their approaches to nearby San Jose International Airport and, in the background high in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the shuttered radar atop Mount Umunhum looks so close a hitter really connecting with a high fastball could almost hope to reach it.

  Wheeler started 2011 on fire, pitching five no-hit innings to pick up a win in his first game. He went to 2-0 and then started to run into control issues. He wasn’t bumped to the bullpen as he had been the year before, nothing as extreme as that, but he did walk way too many hitters. Sometimes it was as if he needed to be reminded of how high the stakes were, and just such a reminder came early in the year. The San Jose Giants were in Bakersfield, a city forever plagued by a pall of acrid, fresh-from-the-smokestacks smog, a city often referred to as the armpit of California. Shortstop Brandon Crawford, an amiable, upbeat sort, was there with his San Jose teammates and then he heard from Giants assistant general manager Bobby Evans.

  “We were down in Bakersfield, and he called me late, close to midnight, and was like, ‘Hey, how quick can you get to Fresno?’” Crawford recalled for me. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know, I’m in Bakersfield. We took the team bus down, it’s not like I have a car.’ He was like, ‘All right, we’ll figure it out. We’re going to call you up to San Francisco tomorrow.’ I was like, ‘All right, wow, cool.’”

  Crawford showed up in San Francisco just before game time and watched from the dugout. The next day in Milwaukee, he started at shortstop for the Giants and remembers he was so nervous, it felt like an out-of-body experience until Rickie Weeks, the Brewers’ leadoff hitter that day, hit a ground ball and Crawford threw him out at first and snapped out of his reverie. “I was like, ‘All right, all right, it’s ju
st baseball again. We’re in Milwaukee now, not Bakersfield, but it’s still baseball.’” He won that game for the Giants with a grand slam, the kind of debut kids dream about.

  For Wheeler and his teammates, it was a shot of adrenaline to see Crawford hop straight to the big leagues and make so huge a splash. Soon Wheeler was mowing them down again, and the team was hot. “Zack Wheeler struck out twelve in seven innings on Sunday, and the Giants won their tenth straight, one shy of the San Jose franchise record,” the San Jose Mercury News reported on May 30, 2011, which was Wheeler’s twenty-first birthday. To celebrate, Wheeler went out with a group including Alex Burg to the Yard House, a popular spot at Santana Row, a nearby upscale mall. “We had a rule: If our manager showed up, we had to leave,” Burg says. “The night of Zack’s twenty-first birthday, we were already at the Yard House and our manager comes in. He looked at us, winked, and then he finished his beer and left.”

  On July 18, thirty-seven-year-old Giants shortstop Miguel ­Tejada strained an abdominal muscle and landed on the disabled list. That prompted Brian Sabean to send minor-league pitchers ­Jason Stoffel and Henry Sosa to the Astros for middle infielder Jeff Keppinger, batting .307 that year in Houston in limited duty. Sabean explained to reporters in the Bay Area that he’d first talked with Houston about Keppinger a week earlier, but then had been sidetracked by talks with another club on “something we thought was much bigger.” Hmm, what could that have been?