Baseball Maverick Page 21

  Matt Harvey had a hard-luck loss the next day in Miami in his sixth start of the year, giving up just one run in 51/3 innings, then bounced back in style his next time out. It was a warm, cloudy day, 70 degrees at Citi Field when Harvey took the mound on May 7 against the White Sox, and the crowd of 23,394 buzzed with expectation from the first inning, when Harvey picked up a bloody nose but seemed as locked in as ever. Each of the first two Chicago batters made contact, sending balls to the outfield, but both were caught, and Harvey struck out Álex Ríos to end the inning. Harvey worked a 1-2-3 second and a 1-2-3 third, adding three more strikeouts. It was the same in the fourth and fifth—Harvey was still perfect. All over New York, Mets fans were receiving texts and phone messages saying “Turn on your TV!” Sports bars filled up with the curious and the avid.

  Even more pumped up now, Harvey struck out two of three White Sox hitters he faced in the top of the sixth and opened the seventh with another strikeout and a groundout. Ríos then reached for an outside slider and grounded the ball into the hole, where Mets shortstop Rubén Tejada backhanded it and leaped and twisted to throw to first. Ríos just beat the throw. Harvey’s no-hit bid had expired, but he struck out the next batter, Adam Dunn, and worked a total of nine innings of one-hit, shutout ball with twelve strikeouts. But the Mets had not been able to score either, so it went into extra innings. Bobby Parnell pitched a scoreless tenth and Mike Baxter singled home Ike Davis in the bottom of the inning for a walk-off win.

  Harvey took a no-decision for his work in that game, dropping his ERA to 1.28, but he did earn a Sports Illustrated cover. The following week, there he was, “The Dark Knight of Gotham,” captured on the mound mid-delivery in his Mets uniform, along with the subhead: “In an era dominated by the power pitcher, the Mets’ Matt Harvey has the ferocity of stuff and will to rise above them all.”

  He won at Wrigley Field on May 17 to push his record to 5-0 with an ERA of 1.55, but his pitching wasn’t even the big story that day. Even though Harvey had thrown ninety-two pitches through six innings, Terry Collins left him in to bat in the top of the seventh with the game tied 2–2. Harvey singled to left, scoring Rick Ankiel, and the Mets were on their way to a 3–2 win, their second straight after having lost seven of ten.

  Another Mets player getting off to a torrid start was veteran catcher John Buck, the throwin on the trade that sent R. A. Dickey to the Blue Jays. A month into the season, Buck was leading the National League with twenty-three RBIs and had eight home runs. It was clear he would come back to earth at some point, but watching a player get that hot was fun for everyone—and only served as a reminder of how little struggling first baseman Ike Davis was contributing. Speculation was kicking around in the media by mid-May that Davis, known for his slow starts, was about to be sent down to Triple-A Las Vegas, and Alderson used the occasion of that road trip to Chicago to have a talk with him.

  “Look, it’s not imminent,” Alderson told him. “Don’t worry about it. Go play.”

  Next up were three games back in New York against the Reds and, unfortunately, Davis’ epic struggles and their lead-weight impact on the team were by this time becoming the dominant story line. The Reds jumped out to a three-run lead against journeyman starter Shaun Marcum in the first inning of the series opener, a rally that would have been limited if Davis had not been called for obstructing runner Joey Votto. Davis came up in the bottom of the inning with the bases loaded, a prime chance to atone. He was at that point tunneling deep into the agony of a 1-for-30 streak, but all it would have taken was one good swing. Instead, Davis grounded out weakly to end the inning. He struck out his next two at bats and was pulled from the game by the sixth.

  One day later, his frustration continued. The game got away from the Mets early when David Wright of all people let a ball squirt between his legs in the top of the first for an error that scored two runs, putting the Mets down 3–0. The best chance to rally came when John Buck doubled with Lucas Duda on first, giving Davis runners at second and third. Davis then hit yet another weak grounder to first to snuff out the would-be rally, earning a hearty round of boos on his way back to the dugout. The Latin players have an expression, “un out vestido de pelotero,” and Davis that game, and in so many others that month, was an out dressed up as a ballplayer.

  The signature screwup in the Mets’ third straight loss to the Reds for a series sweep came when Brandon Phillips hit a little squibber down the first-base line. You could almost see the gears churning in Davis’ head as he tried to decide whether it would go foul. Finally, in a sudden jerk at the last moment, he pulled his glove back, gambling the ball would take a friendly bounce. He lost the gamble. A run scored and the Mets didn’t even get an out at first. Davis once again had made not just himself look bad, but the whole team. The Mets had an off day next, so Davis and his funk were only going to get more media attention, just the sort of situation Alderson made a point of tamping down whenever possible. There was only so much tamping he could do with Davis kicking the ball around at first and sinking to the distinction of having the worst batting average in the National League. For all the talk of OPS and other slick stats mattering more than batting average, no player dead last in the league in that category was ever going to sleep well.

  The Mets were 7-1 in games started by Harvey or left-hander Jon Niese, their Opening Day starter, and 1-7 in their other games. Niese was in his fourth full season, coming off solid but unspectacular showings of 9-10 in 2010 and 11-11 in 2011, then a major step forward in 2012 with a 13-9 record and an ERA of 3.40, compared with 4.40 the year before, a development made possible by his refinement of a cut-fastball that he threw more often and with far more effectiveness. Harvey and Niese were shaping up as bona fide front-of-the-rotation guys, but after that, there was no there there.

  Dillon Gee was coming off a strange injury. A twenty-first-round pick of the Mets in 2007, he’d had a sudden opportunity to make an impression after Mets starter Chris Young required shoulder surgery early in the 2011 season. Up to that season, Gee had appeared in only five big-league games, but after Young’s injury he stepped in beautifully, going on an 8-1 run with a 3.32 ERA through the end of June and finishing that year 13-6. But in July 2012, tests revealed that Gee had a blood clot in his right shoulder. It was a scary time for him. He had surgery to remove the clot and finished the year on the disabled list.

  Alderson was CEO of the Padres when they selected Jeremy Hefner in the fifth round of the 2007 draft out of Seminole State College in Oklahoma, but he didn’t stick in San Diego. By late 2011 he was available for the Mets to claim off the waiver wire, and as a rookie in 2012 he finished 4-7 with a 5.09 ERA. Hefner had neither an overpowering fastball nor an obvious out pitch, and gave up 110 hits in 932/3 innings his first year.

  In late January 2013 the Mets had become the last team in baseball to sign a free agent that offseason, buying a little insurance for their starting rotation by agreeing to pay veteran Shaun Marcum $4 million for one year. Marcum, with the Blue Jays for five years and then the Brewers, had won twelve or more games three times in his eight seasons and had a career ERA of 3.76 with 746 strikeouts. He was coming off a year marked by elbow issues, and in 2009 he’d had Tommy John reconstructive elbow surgery. In spring training with the Mets, he developed a pinched nerve in his neck and missed thirty-six days, including some of the regular season, before finally joining the rotation and losing game after game.

  Alderson would have liked to stay in New York after the three straight losses to the Reds and manage the situation the best he could; in fact, he’d have loved to do that, but he’d given his word that he would attend a ceremony honoring Walter Haas, the former owner of the A’s, so he and Linda went straight from the ballpark that Wednesday to JFK for a flight to California. He wasn’t sure how much he’d actually enjoy this Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame Enshrinement Banquet, but it would be good to see Wally Haas and his wife, Julie, as well as Roy and Betsy Eisenhardt and some other old friends.

 
; “I didn’t want to miss it,” he says. “First of all I wanted to honor Walter Haas, but also I wanted to be there for Wally and Julie. They had come to my dad’s funeral. It was important to be there.”

  Alderson flew back to New York the next day in time for a long night at Citi Field. Hefner gave up a two-run homer in the first, and the Mets looked doomed to roll to their fourth loss in a row, but to their credit they hung in there. Under a pelting rain that made playing conditions a step beyond ludicrous, they strung together an eighth-inning rally to tie the game. Second baseman Daniel Murphy, the team’s hottest hitter to that point of the season, singled home John Buck and moved shortstop Rubén Tejada to third, where he scored on a wild pitch to even it up.

  The heavy rain finally forced a delay. Alderson hoped the game would resume, of course, given the way his team had come back, but instead, following a seventy-six-minute delay, it was suspended—to be completed the following day. Davis struck out four times in the incomplete game, and if ever there was a day when a player came to the plate looking like an automatic out, this was it. After the game Davis went straight to the batting cage and swung the bat for close to two hours. Whether those swings were more about getting himself back on track or merely demonstrating that he knew something had to change was not clear. To Alderson, the time to send him down to Triple-A Las Vegas was getting very close.

  “Ike had looked awful,” Alderson says. “He came into the clubhouse afterward and walked into the indoor batting cage. There were like five players giving him suggestions what to do, which was part of the problem. Hitting coach Dave Hudgens was in there to protect him from this onslaught of advice. One of the reasons to send him to Vegas was to get him away from all that. Ike just looked completely lost.”

  The Braves resumed the suspended game the following ­afternoon—but not the Mets, not really. They came out looking like sleepwalkers. The ninth inning passed without signs of a pulse, and then in the Atlanta half of the tenth, Freddie Freeman worked a walk to lead off. Ike Davis, visibly removed from the action, was near the line to hold him on when Brian McCann lifted a line drive his direction. An alert player would have timed his leap and snagged the liner—or, if he was a poor jumper, at least made an effort at it, maybe knocking the ball down. Davis, sluggish and absent, reacted too late. Alderson’s frustration mounted.

  “He was now taking his offense out on the field and it was affecting his defense,” he told me the following week. “In fact, that had been the case for some time.”

  The Mets lost and it was a galling outcome: not so much the fourth straight L as the giving-it-away flat performance.

  “I told Terry I didn’t think we were ready to play,” Alderson said at the time.

  The Mets still had to play that day’s regularly scheduled contest against the Braves. Dillon Gee matched zeroes with Braves starter Mike Minor for four innings and then grooved a fastball down the middle that Minor himself stroked for a two-run homer to carry the Braves to a five-run fifth and an easy 6–0 win, all shown to a wide TV audience via Fox Sports. The Mets had now lost five in a row. Then a strange thing happened in the series finale: With the Mets trailing 2–1 in the bottom of the eighth, five outs away from making it six straight losses, they loaded the bases and sent up Davis, hitting all of .148 as of the start of the game. Davis did not rip the ball. The grounder he hit to the right side of the infield could safely be characterized as weak. But it found its way to the outfield grass, two runs scored, and—for the moment—Davis was a hero. It was like a mountain had been lifted from his shoulders.

  “You say to yourself, ‘OK, he’s going to build on this,’” Alderson said.

  Davis was not the only Mets player who was making a case to be sent down to Las Vegas. If a team is staking its future on young players, few developments are more alarming than the kind of overt regression that shortstop Rubén Tejada was demonstrating. Tejada, a Panamanian signed by the Mets in 2006, made his big-league debut at age twenty in 2010, and in 2012 he hit a respectable .289 in 464 at bats, though with only twenty-seven walks, fielding his position solidly enough. Tejada had another O-fer in the win against the Braves, dropping his average to .218, and his play in the field was becoming a glaring issue. Like Davis, he was letting his funk at the plate carry over to distracted, muddled play in the field.

  “We were suffering from the same problem at shortstop,” Alderson told me that month. “We’d talked about sending Tejada out, but we were sort of hostage to Ike. If we weren’t going to send Ike out, we couldn’t send Tejada. They were both going to have to go. To me that would be a stronger statement about the team and what level of performance was acceptable and what was not. In Ike’s case, we thought it would be short term and in his interest.”

  The 2013 Yankees, ravaged by injuries to key veterans, were an odd hodgepodge coming into their June series against the Mets, with Jayson Nix at shortstop, David Adams at third, and Lyle Overbay at first base, but still they were ten games over .500. At Citi Field on May 27 for the first of the games, David Wright helped everyone tune out the gloom hanging over the Mets with a solo shot in the seventh inning to tie the game 1–1. Daniel Murphy knocked in the go-ahead run in the eighth, and the Mets pulled off a 2–1 win against their crosstown rival. Davis, far from building on his game-winning hit the previous night, struck out in all three at bats to drop his batting average to .155. Tejada went 0-for-4.

  Alderson, one of the more competitive men on the planet, has always been especially competitive when it comes to rivalries. Any game with the Yankees was a teeth-gritting marathon for the nerves. The Monday night win over the Yankees at Citi Field was sweet, but Alderson was not about to be satisfied by a split in the two-game series in Queens before the teams moved to the Bronx for two more games. From the first pitch the Tuesday night game against the Yankees at Citi Field had the sort of crisp, attentive intensity so rare for the Mets in recent years. A good number of the 31,877 in attendance were no doubt pulling for the Yankees, but so what? It was a packed house and with Matt Harvey on the mound the Mets were a team transformed, more purposeful and more confident, less likely to half-ass their way to poor play. Harvey, amped up by his first start against the team he grew up cheering on, started Yankees leadoff batter Brett Gardner with a 96-mile-an-hour fastball that missed, then came back with another fastball that Gardner smoked to center field, but recent acquisition Rick Ankiel, always a good glove man, made the play. It was a 1-2-3 first for Harvey and a 1-2-3 second, punctuated by strikeouts of Lyle Overbay and David Adams, both looking, at high-octane fastballs (97, 98) that had the place buzzing. The Yankees broke through for two singles in the third, but Harvey struck out the side to keep his shutout going, all three strikeouts coming on hard-biting sliders.

  Harvey’s command of the game was so intense, so startling, it was almost tempting to forget about the festering problem of what to do about Davis and Tejada—almost. Both kept making the case they needed to be sent down, Davis with strikeouts his first two times up, Tejada with more shoddy play. Alderson, watching the game in his box with assistant general manager John Ricco, was ready to credit Davis or Tejada with anything to weigh in the plus category, but nothing came. If Davis’ big hit the night before was going to open the floodgates, now was the time—but nothing.

  “It was like Groundhog Day for Ike and Tejada,” Alderson said. “It was sort of business as usual for Ike, strikeouts and looking terrible at the plate, and Tejada looked particularly bad in the field and did nothing at the plate.”

  Yankees right fielder Ichiro Suzuki jumped on the first pitch he saw in the top of the seventh, a 93-mile-per-hour fastball, and hit a line shot right back up the middle. Harvey twisted so the ball hit him in the back, a smart play. He collected the ball, threw to first for the out, and then glared at the Mets dugout and waved off any visit from the team trainer, but Ray Ramirez trotted out dutifully anyway just to be sure Harvey was fine. Safe to say, no way was he coming out of the game.

  It’s a fi
rm general rule that a shortstop takes any ball he can; if there’s any doubt about whether it’s his play or another infielder’s, it’s the shortstop’s play. This is the kind of thing burned into any player when he’s young, along with knowing that three strikes means you’re out. Yet with Robinson Cano at first after a sharp single in the top of the eighth, Vernon Wells hit a grounder up the middle, and Tejada suddenly gave up on the ball. It was a startling lapse, especially when you noticed: The grounder was clearly on Tejada’s side of the bag! That’s his territory! Yet he glanced up at Daniel Murphy and let the ball scoot up the middle for what was scored a hit. It was a mental error, the worst sort.

  By the eighth inning Alderson was through trying to be patient. This was the key frame, one inning before the Yankees could bring in the best closer in the history of the game. The Mets badly needed to get something going, but both Davis and Tejada grounded out.

  “It’s time to get this done,” Alderson told Ricco. “We’ve got to send these guys out. We have to change the dynamic.”

  The kicker was: The Mets didn’t even know which players they planned to call up. No automatic options presented themselves. Las Vegas had its own game in progress at the time, so they couldn’t even check in with Wally Backman to see what he recommended until later, but Alderson felt so strongly about the need to make the move, he was ready to go.

  Alderson walked down to the clubhouse to talk to Terry Collins, who was watching the game there, having been thrown out.

  “Let’s do this,” Alderson said to Collins of the move. “Let’s get this over with.”