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  Collins adamantly agreed.

  Alderson took his dog, Buddy, down to the parking lot to have him wait in the car until the game was over, so Alderson could be on his way. With Mariano Rivera about to take the mound, statistically speaking, the outcome was as close to a foregone conclusion as it could be. Baseball’s all-time saves leader was 18-for-18 in save situations that year, and forty-three years old or not, Rivera’s looked as unhittable as ever. Alderson went back into the clubhouse so he and Collins could talk with Davis and Tejada after the game. He had even spoken to vice president for communications Jay Horwitz and arranged to have the usual postgame interview procedure changed up so that instead of Collins speaking first to reporters in the press room, Yankees manager Joe Girardi would, giving Alderson and Collins time to give their two troubled players the news that they were Vegas bound.

  Rather than watch in the plush expanse of the main clubhouse, which looked like an airport VIP lounge with its leather sofas and recessed lockers, Alderson ducked into the adjoining coaches’ office to watch as Daniel Murphy poked a 1-1 pitch from Rivera down the left-field line. The ball looked ready to go foul, but it landed a yard inside the chalk line and the Mets had a leadoff double. The crowd seemed as stunned as it did excited, but got louder as David Wright worked the count to 2-0 against Rivera, both balls missing inside. Rivera tried coming in on Wright again and he ripped the ball up the middle for a single that scored Murphy to tie the game. Rivera, so used to being automatic, didn’t even back up on the throw home, which squirted away from the catcher, enabling Wright to scamper down to second. That brought up Lucas Duda, a natural first baseman asked to play left field early in the season, who fisted a single into shallow right to win the game. Wright came around to score on a hands-out slide like a kid coming down a waterslide, and the Mets had done the unthinkable: They came back to beat Mariano Rivera, knocking three straight hits without him getting a single out against them!

  “It all happened within two or three minutes,” Alderson said. “Murphy got the double down the line, David Wright singled him in and went to second on the throw, and then Duda on the second pitch hit that dunker behind second base and it was over. Boom!”

  Alderson was elated. He watched for Collins walking in from behind the dugout and flashed him the safe sign, meaning: Not tonight.

  “He totally agreed,” Alderson said. “We didn’t even have to discuss it. We didn’t want to screw with what was going on in the clubhouse. The Yankees had not lost a game they’d led after six innings until that night. It was the first time in Rivera’s career that he had not got a single out in a save situation. That is incredible. It was a big win, historic in a way, given Rivera’s history.”

  Davis and Tejada gained a reprieve at the eleventh hour. That didn’t mean they avoided a talking-to, just that it had no plane ticket attached to it—this time. Both players were informed that if not for the amazing comeback against Rivera, they’d have been sent out. Given Alderson’s assurances to Davis just over a week earlier that no move was imminent, he now felt that the only honorable thing to do was to let Davis know the situation had changed and he was on thin ice.

  “I needed to put him on notice,” he said. “Adding a little pressure might make a difference. It couldn’t make him worse.”

  The talk went well.

  “Look, I don’t know about hitting mechanics,” the general manager told his first baseman. “I won’t tell you anything, but you’ve got to get your act together.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Davis agreed.

  The message with Tejada was parallel, but Alderson had less sense of the young player’s reaction. He seemed in a fog.

  “It’s time to get it going,” Collins told him. “We’re fifty games into it. All of the kinks should be out by now.”

  The Mets headed up to the Bronx for game three of the four-game home-and-home series, and the Yankees were eager for revenge. It was galling to lose to the Mets, especially two in a row. Instead, they were the ones who were spanked. The Mets erupted for an improbable five-run outburst in the first inning, made all the more improbable by the fact that two of the Mets’ four hits came from Tejada (leadoff single) and Davis (single to drive in two runs). If nothing else, the team clearly had Tejada’s and Davis’ attention—but maybe too much so. (Tejada had been upbraided for his passive play on that ground ball up the middle. “You’ve got to make that dive,” he was told.)

  The Mets were up 9–3 in the bottom of the ninth inning when Reid Brignac lifted a high pop-up down the left-field line. Journeyman Mike Baxter, getting the start in left field, had plenty of time to run in and camp underneath the ball, ready to make the grab, and then right at the last second Tejada—intent on showing he could be eager—came flying into the picture. He had to throw on the brakes with a sudden slide to avoid a collision. Baxter made the catch, then deftly hopped sideways to avoid the onrushing Tejada, who winced and clutched at his leg as he labored to pull himself upright again: He’d hurt himself on the play.

  “Clearly he was mindful of what had happened the night before,” Alderson said.

  The timing was convenient: By landing on the disabled list, Tejada staved off the indignity of being sent down to Triple-A. Some of his teammates might have questioned how genuine his injury actually was, but not Alderson.

  “Based on his immediate reaction, I don’t think he’s jaking it,” he said that week. “The way he grimaced when he slid into foul territory, that’s something that’s tough to contrive.”

  For Alderson and team officials, it was a week that confirmed their worst hunches about Tejada. “It’s the second year in a row he’s had a quad pull, and if you hurt it like that, it can leave residual scarring, which leads to problems later,” Alderson said. “There’s been criticism of him that he’s not in good shape, he comes to camp late, he’s not working out diligently in the offseason. Does his weight contribute to the injury? Does the lack of conditioning? Does it contribute to a lack of range at short? … Gradually you come to the conclusion that Tejada is just a placeholder. He’s not a long-term guy for us.”

  A four-game sweep of the Yankees in the only games the teams would play during the 2013 regular season had seemed impossible going in, but after the 9–4 drubbing the Mets had handed their rivals, pushing their winning streak to four games, they went into the series finale with hop in their step and a gleam in their eye. They could feel that they had the Yankees reeling. If they could complete the sweep, it would be almost as sweet for the agony it inflicted on the Yankees as it would be for the wins themselves.

  Dillon Gee, the control pitcher easy to overlook, was masterful against the Bronx Bombers. He gave up a third-inning solo shot to their best hitter, Cano, and then set down fifteen Yankees in a row, finishing with a career-high twelve strikeouts. The Mets cruised to what felt like an easy 3–1 win, buoyed by Marlon Byrd’s two-run homer in the second. The Yankees were now officially in trouble, having lost five in a row for their worst skid of the season.

  “It’s hard when you lose to your crosstown rivals,” a glum Girardi told reporters afterward, adding, “It’s going to happen, but you don’t want to be the team that it happens to.”

  For many of the Mets, it might not have been clear until the media reaction kicked in just what they’d achieved with the four wins.

  WHERE NO METS HAVE GONE BEFORE ran the Star Trek–evoking headline in the New York Times.

  “Bobby Valentine’s 1997 Mets were a plucky group of overachievers who won their first Subway Series game against the Yankees, the defending World Series champions, but they did not sweep the series,” David Waldstein wrote in the Times. “The 1998 and ’99 Mets were brash contenders, but they could not do it, either. Nor could the 2000 Mets, who won the National League pennant, or the 2006 team that went deep into the playoffs. In sixteen previous years of interleague play, no Mets team had ever earned a season-series sweep against the Yankees.”

  Added Newsday: “The Mets’ season, an aftert
hought only last weekend, suddenly has gained some relevance thanks to a most improbable sweep of the Subway Series.”

  Alderson likes to talk about how over the course of a season, certain key games stand out, in either a negative way or a positive way. They punctuate a season and give it color and texture and meaning, whether they end up defining that season or not. In four games against the Yankees the 2013 Mets had found something in themselves they didn’t know was there, and the discovery made a lot of things easier. They were a team with too many holes not to be up and down and all over the place. The whole season would not feel this sweet. But even a little dose of this kind of giddy exuberance had a way of making the longer-term waiting easier to endure. The fantasy of a dominant rotation fronted by Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler, one that might power the Mets on a years-long run of success, might still just be a fantasy, but it was one that somehow felt a step closer, a step less mad, after those final two victories in the Bronx.

  14

  PATIENCE

  Like Matt Harvey in 2012, Zack Wheeler found himself sent down to minor-league camp in March 2013, following his single spring appearance for the Mets and a mild issue with his oblique muscle. Getting sent down was not a surprise, but it was still a jarring turn of events for the former first-round pick. A week later he was seeing game action again, throwing three innings of one-hit ball in a minor-league game and announcing via Twitter that he “felt great.”

  Wheeler ran into more difficulties once he was assigned to the Triple-A Las Vegas 51s, as in Area 51, surely one of the cooler sports team names ever. Vegas is notoriously hard on pitchers, and a painful blister developed underneath the fingernail of Wheeler’s middle finger on his pitching hand, making it hard for him to throw his slider and disrupting his rhythm during his first two starts with Vegas. He did better his third time out, giving up three runs over 51/3 innings and not walking a single batter. Dillon Gee and Jeremy Hefner were both struggling for the Mets, so by mid-April 2013 the pressure was mounting on Alderson and the organization to bring Wheeler up right away.

  TERRY PUSHES FOR ZACK, ran a New York Daily News headline on April 18 with a subhead: “Collins wants Wheeler, but Alderson may balk.” Reporting from Denver, where Alderson had chipped in to shovel snow so the Rockies and Mets could avoid a rare snow cancellation, Kristie Ackert wrote: “With the back end of the Mets rotation struggling through the first two weeks of the season, calls for top pitching prospect Zack Wheeler are getting louder. Even Terry Collins said he might have to think about asking for some of the young, quality reinforcements the franchise has stockpiled in the minors if the struggles continue.”

  The following day, I set out early from where I live near Santa Cruz, California, to make the 530-mile drive down to Las Vegas to see Wheeler pitch against the Sacramento River Cats, Oakland’s Triple-A affiliate. Before I left, I called Alderson to get his up-to-the-minute take on where Wheeler was, given the blister under his fingernail that had caused him trouble early in the Las Vegas season. “We’re concerned that it’s recurring and we can’t seem to be able to resolve it,” Alderson told me that morning. “If it continues to happen from time to time, it will have an impact, but at this point it doesn’t seem to be anything serious. We’ll see how he pitches the next two, three outings, and if he pitches well in those outings then we might take a look at him.”

  What did he need to work on?

  “I think it’s more about command than anything else, command of all of his pitches,” he said. “He needs fastball command. Everybody needs to have fastball command on both sides of the plate.”

  Matt Harvey had just been named National League Player of the Week after going 2-0 with a 1.20 ERA over fifteen innings, striking out fifteen and giving up just four walks. In one of those perversely detailed stats it so often comes up with, the Elias Sports Bureau let it be known that Harvey was the first pitcher since 1900 to win his first three starts in a season allowing six hits or less over those three games and striking out at least twenty-five. Matt mania was beginning to brew. I asked Alderson if Harvey’s success made it easier for Wheeler to advance.

  “Yes and no,” he said. “In one sense the fact we didn’t bring Harvey up until July is a precedent for Wheeler. The one perception we don’t want to create is that we rushed Wheeler. To me, if he pitches well three or four times in a row, there is no reason to keep him down. I actually think that having both of them together in the big leagues would be a big positive for Wheeler. He could become almost a protégé.”

  Vegas is a strange place to play baseball and an even stranger place to watch it. The thin desert air lifts everything, like helium, so that the time-honored balance between hitter and pitcher goes out the window. A nasty breaking ball anywhere else becomes a hittable pitch here, and a safety-hack poke at an outside pitch can easily yield a down-the-line opposite-field flare home run. It was 74 degrees at game time the night I watched Wheeler pitch, with almost no breeze, and felt warmer. In the distance the horizon glowed with a fringe of desert sunset the color of melted cheese. Just a few hours earlier that day, a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing had been apprehended, and the announced crowd of 4,979 had a confused, edgy mood to it. As Wheeler peered in for the sign before throwing his first pitch, President Obama was addressing the nation about the Boston tragedy.

  Wheeler, always relaxed-looking on the mound, coiled and unleashed his first pitch of the night: a high fastball, so high in fact that it glanced off catcher Landon Powell’s mitt and rolled away. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t get to see d’Arnaud play. He’d broken his big toe the night before and was due to be out four to six weeks, meaning that as far as his chances of joining the Mets any time soon, “d’Arnaud has become a moot point,” Alderson told me that morning.

  Again Wheeler peered in, saw the sign for fastball, and again let a fastball fly that was up and away. He talked to himself on the mound a little, tried to shake it off, and then for the third time came in up and away with his fastball. A 3-0 count on the first batter, a .194 hitter named Conner Crumbliss, was no way to send the message to the Mets’ front office that he was ready for a promotion. Wheeler came back with two good fastballs, low and on the corner, to run the count full and then got Crumbliss on a flyout that right fielder Jamie Hoffmann nearly misplayed into a hit. From there Wheeler started to settle in, jumping ahead 1-2 against second baseman Grant Green, then getting him to fly out to center, though Juan Lagares, in a rare lapse, misjudged the ball badly before recovering to make the out. Then it was straight cheese to strike out .372-hitting Shane Peterson, a 97-mile-per-hour fastball.

  Back out for the second, Wheeler looked calm and collected except for his occasional habit of hitching up his belt buckle distractedly, a move that made him look boyish. Again he started the inning off with a fastball missing up and away. The problem with showing that much wildness, especially with fastballs hitting 97 on the gun, is that you’re not going to catch a break from the umps on close pitches. Sure enough, two more fastballs that could have been called strikes were not, making it 3-0, and Wheeler came back with the same pitch, again called a ball, to put Michael Choice on first. That brought up catcher Stephen Vogt and Wheeler walked him, too, then gave up a flare single to right to load the bases. Daric Barton got a hittable breaking ball and scorched it to right-center, but Lagares, showing the moves that would make an impression on the Mets later in the season, ran it down to limit the damage to one run on a sac fly. Wheeler walked two more in the third and another in the fourth, again missing by a lot, to bring his total for the game to five. Then in the top of the fifth he walked one more and was pulled with one out, having thrown 108 pitches. If the Mets were watching to see if he could string three good starts together, this was clearly not going to count as one of the three: four earned runs in 41/3 innings with six walks to go with four strikeouts. He was 0-1 with a 4.91 ERA after four starts.

  Alderson had cautioned me not to think of Triple-A players as a bunch of kids, and looking around
the no-frills dressing room at Cashman Field, there were players at all stages in their career. Infielder Omar Quintanilla, for example, Oakland’s first-round pick in 2003, was thirty-one. The Mets signed him as a free agent in January 2012, traded him to the Orioles that July, then signed him as a free agent again in January 2013. He was hitting .250, but hoping still to get a shot with the Mets. Over near Wheeler’s locker stood Josh Satin, who had grown up in L.A. and played at Cal. He was hitting .350 for Vegas, but at twenty-eight, with only a handful of big-league games under his belt to that point, he could hear the clock ticking. Satin had been around and he knew enough to assume the visiting reporter was there to talk to Wheeler, not him.

  “Last year I lived with Matt Harvey and he didn’t do very well in the beginning,” Satin told me. “He couldn’t throw strikes. He was throwing 95. Zack’s throwing 97. But it took Matt some time to really figure out how to pitch and I think that’s benefited him. Yeah, Matt could have gone there last year at the beginning of the year and thrown his 95-mile-per-hour fastball and probably done pretty well. But there’s no way that he could have done what he’s doing right now without his time here in Triple-A.

  “I was telling Zack today during the game: ‘It’s not that easy, no matter what. So learn what you’ve got to do and keep working. I think the biggest thing is the precise control with all your pitches.’ He can throw a fastball at 97 by anybody, but when you get there and, I don’t know, Chase Utley is up, you have to do a little something when you get to a 2-1 count. You need to be able to throw a breaking ball for a strike to keep him off guard or he’s just going to cheat. So I think the more Zack figures out what he needs to do and really harnesses what he has, the sky is the limit. I think the world of Matt and I think Zack has equal or better stuff than him. Once he gets that down, those two in the future is an incredible deal.”