Baseball Maverick Page 23

Satin, a former political science major, tries to dial down his articulateness at times. He doesn’t want to stand out as a Cal guy. But he’d spent years taking the long view and he’d had a front-row seat the last two years watching the growing pains of both Harvey and Wheeler.

  “It’s hard for a guy sometimes,” Satin said, shouting over the music. “I don’t want to say the franchise’s future is in his hands, but that’s what they make it seem like. They’re banking the whole future on these guys.”

  Wheeler came out once he was finished with his shower, and after he’d put some clothes on I asked him to show me his fingernail. He smiled and held it up for me right away, and I was startled to see how black and blue—how ugly—it looked.

  “You can see underneath it,” he told me. “The blister gets underneath the nail and it pops. When it first happens, that’s when it’s really sore because the nail is actually detaching from the skin underneath. So that’s not very fun. But that’s already passed. I think it’s still in the back of my head a little bit if I’m finishing pitches. So I’m still not getting around on my slider. It’s a pain right now.”

  I didn’t expect Wheeler to offer much in the way of self-­revelation, but I was wrong. He has a quiet to him, not so much shy as self-contained, and it’s easy to fall into that sportswriter habit of overvaluing lively quotes. More important than a gift for aphorism is the relaxed self-awareness to really show something.

  Wheeler and I started talking about how he compared ­himself—and didn’t compare himself—with Harvey. The two were going to throw together in Atlanta the previous offseason, since both had been living there, but Harvey decided to work out in New York for the offseason, so that didn’t work out.

  “He loves what he does,” Wheeler said. “He gets up there and just pitches well every time. He’s a competitor and he thinks he’s the best. I think that’s the mind-set you’ve got to have. That’s what I’ve always had. I think like that. It’s just I came off it a little bit, because coming in to pro ball that’s what I had.”

  Too often ballplayers dealing with reporters—or authors—give quote, rather than actually speaking, like squeezing something out of a tube. Wheeler was speaking, directly and honestly, the telltale proof coming in how he paid attention to his own words. His eyes took on a different look, pointing toward some murky far-off corner of the locker room, and he almost flinched, so visibly did his demeanor suddenly change.

  “Now that I’ve said it, it clicked in my head just now,” he told me. “You’ve got to go out there and think that nobody can hit you. It got away from me the past year. You’ve got to just go out there and say: ‘Hit it if you want. I’m me for a reason. I’ve worked my way to get to where I am. Try to hit me.’”

  A week did not go by in May 2013 without a fresh call in the New York media for the Mets to get Wheeler up to the big team. The blister issues made it hard for Wheeler, who tended to start slow every season, to get in a groove. If he put together three straight commanding starts, that would be enough to signal to the Mets he was ready, and he finally did that over three starts leading up to May 11. Then he complained of discomfort in his right shoulder and was flown to New York for an MRI, just to be on the safe side, and scratched from his scheduled start on May 17. He was given a cortisone shot, but made two more appearances for Las Vegas by the end of the month, struggling again.

  Wheeler’s twenty-third birthday came on May 30, but the 51s were busy grinding out fifteen hits in an 11–1 win over Reno, so by the time the game was over, Wheeler didn’t feel like doing much to celebrate. “I didn’t do anything,” he told me. “We played the game, and I went back to my apartment and packed for the road trip.”

  After the next night’s game it was time for an all-night bus trip four hundred miles west to Fresno, through places like Barstow and Bakersfield.

  “Do you ever sit on the bus thinking, ‘Man, when I’m in the big leagues, it’s going to be a little different’?” I asked Wheeler around then.

  “Nah, not really,” he said. “I just pass out.”

  By the night of that bus ride, the need for Wheeler in Queens—even a rough, unpolished version of Wheeler—was acute. The brief dopamine surge of the Mets’ four-game sweep of the Yankees, an authentic achievement no matter how you looked at it, won them exactly nothing in the way of new momentum, confidence, or sense of purpose. They flew down from New York for a three-game set with the Marlins, the worst team in the league and losers of nine in a row at that point, and handed away the first game in the series, 5–1. Hard-luck starter Shaun Marcum pitched well enough through six, then came unglued in a four-run frame for the Marlins, falling to an unsightly 0-6 for the season. Marcum, two seasons earlier a 13-7 pitcher with a 3.54 ERA, was looking like a guy without much left. Worse yet, reliable left-hander Jon Niese, the Mets’ Opening Day starter, was scratched from his start with shoulder trouble. Wheeler’s time was coming soon, and everyone felt it.

  “We could bring him up for one day, but his last outing wasn’t very good,” Alderson told me on May 31. “Is this the best time to bring him up for a spot-start?”

  Wally Backman, manager of the Triple-A Las Vegas 51s and a man who at times left the impression that he was campaigning in the press for a promotion, chose this juncture to proclaim that it was time to promote Wheeler. WALLY BACKMAN: ZACK WHEELER READY FOR THE BIG LEAGUES, ran the headline in Newsday on May 30, with the article declaring, “Zack Wheeler has nothing left to do at Triple-A Las Vegas. That’s the take from his manager, Wally Backman. ‘This kid’s ready,’ Backman said. ‘He’s ready to pitch in the big leagues.’”

  If there was doubt about how ready Wheeler was, it made sense for the Mets to delay bringing him up. The so-called Super Two cutoff would occur shortly before June 15. Simply put, players who make their big-league debut early in a season become eligible for arbitration a year sooner than those who are brought up midway through the season, past the cutoff. As ESPN New York’s Adam Rubin summed it up that May 12: “Ike Davis, as a frame of reference, did qualify for the extra year of arbitration and is earning $3.125 million this year because he debuted April 19, 2010. Teammate Dillon Gee—who missed the ‘Super Two’ cutoff because he debuted that September—is at a team-imposed $527,325.”

  If Wheeler had taken a major leap forward down at Las Vegas and gotten past his minor injuries and shown consistent command, the Mets would have been happy to call him up before the Super Two cutoff and put him to work helping them win games—and helping get the fans excited about the future. Wheeler was coming along, but not enough to force a decision on Alderson just yet. The Mets wanted to win as many games in 2013 as they could, since that was essential to moving forward, but the focus continued to be on building up talent to be ready in 2014.

  “We’re going to be judged on how we handle Wheeler and his success over time,” Alderson said. “It’s exactly what happened with Harvey. Let’s bring him up at the right time. The worst thing we could do is rush him and take all the expectations people have about a pitcher like Wheeler and throw them in the trash. If we bring him up and he doesn’t perform, those expectations are not just diminished, they are dashed. I’d like to do something impactful. In a way I’d love to bring up Wheeler and d’Arnaud at the same time, so the focus is: Let’s look to the future! But if they’re not ready, then you’re simply digging a deeper hole.”

  The next evening, June 1, Wheeler took the mound in Fresno against the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, the Grizzlies. At first pitch it was still 99 degrees at Chukchansi Park, a little gem of a ballpark built in 2002 in the post–Camden Yards wave of intimate venues with great sight lines. Just beyond the 324-foot left-field home-run pole, a view opened up of the handful of high-rises making up Fresno’s downtown, with a lineup of old shops in the foreground, including such picturesque local institutions as Luftenburg’s Bridal, open since 1941.

  Wheeler figured at the center of the story the Mets wanted to promote about a bright immediate f
uture, starring Harvey and Wheeler, two young guns who could hit 98, but that evening in Fresno Wheeler was surrounded by players likely to join him with the Mets before the year was out. Everyone knew Kirk Nieuwenhuis could play the outfield, but what about hitting big-league pitching consistently? He was batting only .233 for the 51s at that point. Pitchers David Aardsma, Gonzalez Germen, and Josh Edgin would all get a shot in the Mets bullpen before long. Maybe the hardest player to figure out was Josh Satin, who had struck me the first time I saw him as a lock to become a Mets fan favorite before long.

  Satin could hit, hence his .312 average in Triple-A as of June 1, but his swing was not a thing of elegance—a scout would talk about extra motion; anyone else would say he reminded them of a beer-league slugger. Back at Cal, Satin had sat out a year because of injury, which put him a little behind schedule. He expected a major-league team to draft him after his redshirt junior year with the Golden Bears. “To be quite honest, he said his goodbyes,” Cal coach David Esquer told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Steve Kroner. Satin admitted to being “really, really angry” when he was not drafted that year, but he told Kroner, “My work ethic turned up, like, twenty times.” His last year at Cal, at age twenty-three, he hit .388 with 18 homers, and the Mets took him in the sixth round of the 2008 draft. Then at every step along the way, he’d hit well, but scouts would downgrade him because he was a little older. Satin was also hobbled by a lack of grace or easy athleticism and a lack of home-run power, though he was always good at knowing the strike zone and working a count. As a twenty-five-year-old, he hit .316 for Port St. Lucie in high-A with a .406 on-base percentage and .459 slugging percentage. At Double-A Binghamton the next year he batted .325 with a .423 on-base percentage and .538 slugging percentage. He’d had twenty-six at bats with the Mets by then, in 2011 and 2012, eking out just five hits, and all his efforts were focused on getting another shot.

  “I think sometimes people overblow the fact that I’m an overachiever,” Satin told me. “Why am I an overachiever? I killed in high school, killed in college, killed in the minor leagues. I don’t run well. I don’t throw that well. Maybe that’s what they’re talking about. But I think that sometimes people see athletic ability and ability to move out there, and if you don’t have it, then you’re a huge overachiever. But for me, I think I definitely over time have figured out the best way for me to succeed offensively. I’m not saying by any means that I’ve mastered hitting or I’m like this hitting whiz, but just the way I take at bats I think in the long run is effective.”

  We talked a little about the Alderson philosophy of plate discipline, yes, but above all of looking for a pitch to drive. Call it controlled aggression.

  “I know he teaches that philosophy and I don’t do it because our general manager wants me to hit that way,” he said. “It’s just something that I’ve created for myself over the years. I was always very patient. I’ve really tried to hone in on how to manage patience with aggressiveness, because you can’t just be patient all the time. I think sometimes people get a bad view of what Sandy wants. He doesn’t want you to take pitches just to take pitches. He wants you to swing at your pitch. That’s the whole key. I think in our minor-league system that gets lost in the shuffle. It gets misinterpreted a lot.”

  Satin, when he’s done playing, might make a good coach or front-office executive.

  “The whole key is early in the count, get something you can drive,” he said. “That’s what I live by: I’m not going to swing early unless it’s something that I can really drive. Obviously, sometimes I get fooled, but that’s the key to my philosophy of hitting.”

  It was Star Wars night at Fresno’s Chukchansi Park, and as Wheeler warmed up down the line, the field swarmed with Imperial Stormtroopers. Obi-Wan and Darth Vader exchanged small talk. Something had clicked for Wheeler, whether it was that night in Vegas when he thought it had or at some other point in that stretch of the season. More and more Wheeler displayed the attitude he told me he had to have, an attitude of going with his best and letting that be enough, never in the flamboyant manner of Harvey, but in his own way. He came out in the first inning in Fresno with his fastball hitting 98 and recorded three straight infield groundouts, two of them on off-speed pitches, a sure sign of a pitcher trusting his stuff.

  Fresno took a 1–0 lead in the bottom of the second when Wheeler couldn’t get cleanup hitter Roger Kieschnick out on a full-count fastball, which he fouled off. Kieschnick singled, moved over on a ground ball, and then scored on a single, but Wheeler got out of the inning without further harm and was able to atone in the top of the third. I looked down at the stat sheet and noted Wheeler was hitting .222 with a .364 on-base percentage, not bad for a pitcher, and then looked up to watch Wheeler’s big left-handed swing connect. He stroked a ball over his former teammate Gary Brown’s head in center field and busted his butt running, wanting to stretch it to a double. He legged his way to second at full speed and then—­unbelievably!—went up in the air and into a hard slide into second: safe. Somewhere, Alderson’s heart stopped.

  “That was probably the first time I slid since Little League, honestly,” Wheeler told me. “After I slid I stood up and I looked back, and my slide mark went back a long way. I would have kept on going if the bag wasn’t there. I got a little strawberry on my knee, so I felt like a real ballplayer.”

  Kirk Nieuwenhuis, up next, ripped a no-doubt-about-it home run to right and it was a good thing, too, because there were still no outs, and once Wheeler came around to score, he had a chance to hunch over in the dugout, drink some water in the 99-degree heat, and take a breather. Back on the mound for the bottom of the third, he had a languid, relaxed look throwing his warm-up tosses, even as he wiped his face on his uniform sleeve every so often. He turned to look toward center field for a minute, staring out at the Fresno skyline in a bid to calm himself even more. He had the confident, purposeful look of a pitcher who knew he had a lead and knew he wasn’t going to give it up. He backed up that look, too. A 1-2-3 third, followed by a 1-2-3 fourth. In the fifth Fresno shortstop Carter Jurica came up with two outs and poked one through the left side of the infield for a single, but Wheeler struck out catcher Jackson Williams on an outside breaking ball to end the inning, leaving the crowd of 11,174 with nothing to cheer except Luke and Darth Vader having it out with lightsabers up on the roof.

  Wheeler has an unusual mound presence for a tall power ­pitcher, low-key almost to the point of invisibility, but he also made it clear that he felt as comfortable out there as he would on his living-room sofa watching Baseball Tonight. That night in Fresno, he went through a routine before each inning, hunching his shoulders, throwing his last warm-up tosses, and then taking a few paces toward second base, having a small séance with himself, wiping his face, then kicking at the dirt just in front of the rubber, first with his right foot then his left, smoothing, smoothing, smoothing, and whether he was smoothing the dirt more or his nerves and focus more didn’t really matter. This was not the same pitcher I saw in Vegas six weeks earlier. Back then Wheeler was searching for himself. In Fresno his focus was absolute.

  “So you know what your batting average is right now?” I asked Wheeler after the game, which wound up a 2–1 victory for the 51s.

  “No,” he said with a smile.

  “.300—it says right here,” I said, flapping the postgame box.

  “After tonight?” he asked, grinning.

  Wheeler knew how major a hurdle he had just cleared. He gave up only one walk in his six innings of three-hit ball to go with six strikeouts. He ran his record to 4-1 with a 3.86 ERA; he’d shown he was healthy and he knew the drill: He was almost spitting distance from his big-league debut. I asked him if he could almost taste it. “It’s surreal that right now I’m only two good starts away,” he told me. “You know what I mean? It’s something I’ve looked forward to my whole life.”

  The major-league draft, often a splashy occasion, once again had a muted, underwhelming aspect for the Mets
in 2013. Selecting eleventh overall, the Mets chose first baseman Dominic Smith, and once again they chose someone unlikely to show up in a Mets uniform any time soon. Smith was seventeen years old and had advanced as far as playing for Serra High School in Southern California. He was obviously talented, with scouts raving about his smooth swing, and had tremendous upside. But it was the third year in a row the Mets had used their first-round pick to select a high school student, following their choice of six-foot-three outfielder Brandon Nimmo out of Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 2011 and shortstop Gavin Cecchini from Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 2012, and that was a potentially frustrating development for fans seeing other teams use their picks to get players who could contribute within a year or two. High school picks were riskier, in general, besides taking longer to develop. The Mets said they were not drafting high school athletes as part of a larger plan, just taking the most talented player available when their turn came up. That was true as far as it went, especially with an organization pointing toward 2014 and then 2015, but it also fit with a deeper truth about the Mets under Alderson. They had Paul DePodesta overseeing a tightly run, analytically efficient, organized system for developing minor-league talent, based on the organizational goal of using every tool at their disposal to improve that talent by 30 percent. In stocking their farm system with risky but high-end young talent, they were showing how much they believed in that systematic approach and the value it could produce over time.

  15

  THE BEST DAY OF THE YEAR

  In 2012, Alderson had opted not to have Matt Harvey make his big-league debut at home in New York, since as exciting as that might have been for the fans, far better to be on the road with less media attention and less pressure. In 2013, he would follow the same thinking on Zack Wheeler. For weeks Alderson had been talking about a doubleheader June 18 in Atlanta, when the Mets would need an extra starter, as a prime spot for Wheeler to make his debut, just sixteen miles from his boyhood home in Smyrna, Georgia. As it turned out, Matt Harvey would be starting the first game of the doubleheader, so calling Wheeler up to pitch the second game meant the day could turn into a showcase of young pitching talent.