Baseball Maverick Read online

  16

  “COME ON, BLUE!”

  August 13, 2013, was a date to circle on the calendar: Matt Harvey, the talk of baseball, was pitching at Dodger Stadium against Hyun-Jin Ryu and Alderson would be there in the stands to watch. From a few weeks out it looked likely to be exciting, but by the week beforehand the buzz was almost overwhelming: The Dodgers, a team listless and lost through some stretches of the season, twelve games under .500 on June 21 despite a payroll well over $200 million, were now playing with a giddy, reckless energy most attributed to the arrival of young Cuban force of nature Yasiel Puig. The Dodgers had won six straight and were hoping to push it to their first seven-game winning streak in three years.

  Harvey stood in the way. Based on everything they’d seen from him so far that season, the Dodgers might as well have been going up against Jason Bourne in a fistfight. Fans have been heading down to spring training for generations in search of the thrill of watching young talent unfold before their eyes, but it was rare to see a player come into his own so convincingly over the course of a big-league season. As recently as the year before, many scouts had projected Harvey as a number two or three starter. Now he was looking not only like a true ace, but the kind of ace who can single-handedly take you deep into the postseason. Whatever new thinking had come along to transform baseball, some ages-old baseball truisms remained on the money: Big-game pitchers win big games. An outsized sense of confidence and mission on the mound really can pay off in key moments when a player has all the physical tools to back up the strut.

  Harvey’s performance in the 2013 All-Star Game four weeks earlier on July 16 was one that sent a message to every hitter in the game. It all sounded so perfect: the first All-Star Game held at Citi Field, David Wright starting at third, and the young gun Harvey on the hill for the National League. It was audacious of Harvey to have his eyes set on the prestige start his first full year in the big leagues, but Harvey’s audacity was as much a part of his persona as Woody Allen’s glasses were of his.

  Often the All-Star Game is boring, but from the first pitch this one was riveting. It was comical in a way, watching Harvey go through his warm-up tosses as American League leadoff hitter Mike Trout got ready to take his chances. Harvey loves the attention, loves being at the center of the spotlight, so much so he seems like a guy who would take up fire-eating if it was the only way to draw a crowd—and he’d be the absolute best fire-eater around, count on it. Standing on the mound at Citi Field, surrounded by a packed house, his every twitch captured on national television, he was grinning underneath the poker face. He wound up and unleashed his first pitch—a fastball, of course—and Trout hit it crisply to right for a leadoff double. That brought up Robinson Cano and Harvey promptly drilled him. His 1-0 pitch, a 96-mile-an-hour fastball, darted right for Cano’s knee. There was a horrible instant where everyone, Harvey included, flashed on what it would mean if a Mets pitcher’s errant toss exploded the knee of the franchise player of the Yankees. The ball just missed the more delicate structures of Cano’s knee, but still left a contusion on the leg. No one thought Harvey was trying to hit Cano, but even so, as Cano trotted down to first, Harvey made a point of telling him he was sorry.

  The stage was set for a fascinating range of possibilities from wizardry to epic collapse. Harvey had hungered for this chance and here he was wobbling badly. Two runners on base, no outs, and now he had to contend with the best hitter in the American League, Miguel Cabrera. He worked Cabrera to 2-2, showcasing his slider and changeup as well as his fastball, and then struck him out. Harvey had found his focus now, and he got Chris Davis to fly out to center and then struck Jose Bautista out to end the inning. David Ortiz stroked a ball to deep center to lead off the second, but Bryce Harper ran it down, then Harvey struck out Adam Jones and Joe Mauer lined out to left for a 1-2-3 inning. It was a virtuoso performance, a showcase of all his pitches and all his nerve, and it confirmed what many were saying about Harvey: This one has something special.

  Five days later, back at Citi Field, Harvey worked seven shutout innings in the Mets’ 5–0 win over the Phillies and the next night Dillon Gee threw six innings of no-hit ball against the Braves before the bullpen faltered late. Eight days later in Miami, it was Zack Wheeler’s turn to put on a show: A 1-2-3 first, a 1-2-3 second, and a 1-2-3 third. He walked a batter in the fourth and one in the fifth, but still no hits for the Marlins. Could it be? Could Wheeler do what Harvey and Gee had threatened to do?

  “He was incredible the first three innings,” Alderson said later. “I think he only threw four balls. His pitch count was low throughout the entire game, just pounding the strike zone, hitting the corners. His command was phenomenal.”

  Wheeler went out in the sixth and again it was 1-2-3.

  “He got through six with the no-hitter and was dominant,” Alderson said. “Then in the seventh he got [Giancarlo] Stanton out, walked the next hitter, and gave up an off-field single to Ed Lucas, who was actually a teammate of Bryn’s at Dartmouth.”

  Wheeler gave up two runs in the seventh and ended up with a no-decision, but the Mets came back to win. Still, it was a breakthrough game, clear proof of how Wheeler was developing—and signs of what was to come. Alderson had told me he expected Harvey and Wheeler to challenge each other and that was just what was happening.

  “He’s very quiet, Zack,” David Wright told me. “He has an inner confidence about him, which is what you want in a pitcher. Whereas Matt is probably a little more outgoing, they have that same confidence. They feel like no matter who is in that batter’s box, that they’re better than them. The biggest part I think is they can feed off of each other. Zack can watch Matt and see the way he goes about his business and take something from that. And as much as Matt would probably never admit it, I think he could watch Zack and learn a little bit from that as well. A good competition to have at the top of your rotation is two hungry, young pitchers that want to outdo each other and grab those headlines.”

  All over baseball, hitters were sitting around in groups to discuss Harvey the way that fishing-boat captains talk about incipient gales. His performance against the Rockies on August 7 was the kind to have them shaking their heads. Harvey pitched the first complete-game shutout of his big-league career, giving up just four hits and no walks over nine innings, but the truly impressive part was how he did it: going right at hitters, getting outs on groundouts, and not trying to strike every guy out. The commanding performance lifted his record to 9-3 and dropped his ERA to 2.09, second in the league behind the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw, setting up an interesting contest to see if Harvey might snag a Cy Young Award in his first full season. Since the All-Star Game he’d struck out thirty-one hitters in his four starts and walked only one.

  That was the setup for Harvey’s August 13 start at Dodger Stadium. I was expecting Alderson’s intensity to be on full display beforehand, but he was relaxed and cheerful. We’d had a plan to meet in the long, sleek visiting-team dugout, which at Dodger Stadium extends down the first-base line, but when I arrived there Alderson was nowhere to be found, so I went looking for him and circled back around and spotted him on the Mets’ bench, sitting alone in a tangerine button-down shirt and khaki slacks, his legs poking out in front of him in relaxed fashion. It was like J. P. Ricciardi had told me, Alderson has in some ways mellowed with time. He was intent on enjoying himself, at least for a few minutes, and it was the kind of evening hard not to enjoy, picture perfect in every way, the old ballpark—third oldest in baseball after Fenway and Wrigley—looking its age but good, like a restored ’57 Chevy. It was the first time I’d been there since a $100 million renovation before the 2006 season that included replacing most of the seats and going back to the old color scheme with hues like turquoise and sky blue. Out in left field, where Alderson’s gaze was directed, a huge American flag hung loosely, moving ever so slightly now and then, like a cat’s tail.

  We ended up meeting down near the front door to the visiting-team clubhouse, whe
re I’d killed time looking at a lineup of the Gold Glove Awards won by various Dodgers over the years. Dusty Baker won a Gold Glove for the Dodgers in 1981? Never knew that. Fernando Valenzuela in ’86? That one I remembered. The renovation of Dodger Stadium was even more notable down here in the tunnels connecting the clubhouses with various other chambers, and the echoes of history resounded agreeably. Alderson and I looked around a little, then went to get something to eat in the bustling Dugout Club behind home plate.

  Dinner with Alderson was enjoyable, but it had me thrown. Where was the man whose friend—and physician—had to lecture him years earlier that if he kept living and dying with every pitch during games, he wasn’t going to last very long? Where was the man who sometimes used to get in his car and drive around rather than sit still for the end of a game? We looked for some seats well away from the Mets dugout, so as not to call attention to Alderson’s presence at the game with a member of the press, but found nothing, so ended up sitting in his assigned seats, a dozen or so rows back from the dugout. We stood for the national anthem along with the 46,333 other people at the ballpark that night, and had barely sat back down when, four pitches into the game, promising young Mets center fielder Juan Lagares stunned Ryu by connecting on a 1-0 pitch that hit the top of the left-field wall and bounced over, putting the Mets ahead by a run before Harvey had even taken the mound.

  As Harvey came out to take his warm-up tosses, with music ringing out in the warm evening, it dawned on me that Alderson was so relaxed and friendly at dinner in part because he was genuinely excited and upbeat about watching Harvey pitch. This was good news for the Mets, an agreeable surprise that suddenly had both fans and team officials looking ahead to many years of Harvey anchoring the Mets’ rotation. He had been so impressive in his last start against the Rockies and so consistent all season, so often showcasing no-hit stuff, it was fun to wonder what he might bust out with this time.

  Harvey, given a lead, took care of the Dodgers quickly in the bottom of the first, striking out Carl Crawford and Mark Ellis and getting Adrian Gonzalez to ground out. Alderson was far from at ease. When I say he was in a good mood, I don’t mean he took anything for granted. Never. But Harvey had looked in command in the first, and even with the Dodgers as hot as they were, he was the kind of guy to cool them off. We started talking about his Cy Young chances.

  “Even if he gets to fifteen wins, it could be hard,” Alderson said. But clearly he was not counting Harvey out, any more than he’d counted out his chances of starting the All-Star Game. Josh Satin and Justin Turner both grounded out to start off the Mets’ second, and then catcher John Buck worked a walk, earning sarcastic praise from Alderson, since walks weren’t exactly Buck’s thing. I’d found it odd watching Buck’s work behind the plate that season. He liked to go with a guess, so he would do things like call for the same breaking ball in the same location twice in a row even when it was clear on a given day that the pitcher was not throwing that breaking ball well.

  “Does John call his own game?” I asked.

  “Pretty much, yes, within the framework of the game plan,” Alderson said. “Because of his experience, he tends to freelance a little, which isn’t always good.”

  Talking about his expectations for Travis d’Arnaud, still at that point awaiting his big-league debut, Alderson inevitably touched on what he wanted to see in his batting.

  “The key is making sure like everybody else that he’s disciplined, has a good approach and doesn’t give away at bats,” he said. “We saw that demonstrated very well in Vegas his first month there before he got hurt.”

  Omar Quintanilla struck out to strand Buck at first and then it was Harvey’s turn to head back out. Yasiel Puig reached on an infield single, but no problem, Harvey fielded Skip Schumaker’s comebacker and threw to second to start a double play. A. J. Ellis grounded out to short to end the inning, and Alderson clapped his hands together, eager to see more production at the plate. Up until this point, we’d been talking a lot, discussing his time in the Marines, the old days in Oakland, but now I felt his level of focus take an uptick or two and I wanted to let him concentrate.

  Harvey struck out to start the Mets’ half of the third. Eric Young Jr. worked the count full, and then ended up getting called out on a close pitch, not the first of the night home-plate umpire Jeff Kellogg had called against the Mets. I tried not to flinch when an eruption of sound next to me split the evening air.

  “Come on, blue!” Alderson shouted, startling me with his ­intensity.

  Lagares grounded out to end the inning. A one-run lead on the road never feels comfortable, especially with the way the Dodgers had been coming back in games. Again in the bottom of the inning, Harvey gave up a leadoff single, this time to Juan Uribe, and again the Mets erased him with a double play and then got out of the inning on a groundout.

  Byrd and Satin singled for the Mets in the fourth with one out, but Justin Turner flied to right and Buck grounded out. That was that. Once again, Harvey got into some trouble in the bottom of the inning. A walk and a single put two on, but Gonzalez flied out and Puig hit into a 4-6-3 double play. There was by then a strong sense of Harvey pushing his luck. He couldn’t keep getting double plays to clean up stray runners.

  “When was the last time he had a 1-2-3 inning?” Alderson asked. “Not since the first?”

  Sure enough, the Dodgers put two on base in the fifth on a walk and a single, and this time, no double play. Instead, number eight hitter Nick Punto doubled to drive in both runs. Then in the sixth, two more Dodgers singled to set the table and A. J. Ellis hit a two-run single, and just like that, the Mets were down 4–1. Harvey was done after the sixth.

  There was a feeling of anticlimax once he was gone. It had been like that all season, a sense of the air going out of the balloon once Harvey had departed, but this time was different. He hadn’t been the life of the party this time. Something was off. He didn’t seem quite like himself. He looked more like the number three starter some scouts had projected him as a year or two earlier instead of the dominating All-Star force of nature he had become.

  Alderson was eager to get down to the clubhouse and find out what he could about Harvey’s outing. It was a 4–2 loss, dropping Harvey to 9-4. He finished with only three strikeouts, tying the lowest for his career, and as Newsday reported, by way of the Elias Sports Bureau, he snapped a streak of twenty-six straight starts with at least ten swings and misses, the longest such streak in the majors. Dodgers hitters missed only five of his pitches.

  Buck’s wife went into labor three days later and he took paternity leave, so as planned the Mets called Travis d’Arnaud up from Vegas and he made his major-league debut on August 17, 2013, against the Padres. D’Arnaud drew a walk in his first major-league at bat, one of two in the game, but went hitless. His first big-league hit came on August 20 against the Braves.

  A week later on August 27, just after the Pittsburgh Pirates dropped out of first place, came the announcement that in order to add to their offense, the Pirates were trading touted infield prospect Dilson Herrera and a player to be named later (who turned out to be hard-throwing reliever Vic Black) for Marlon Byrd. The Pirates also received catcher John Buck in the deal.

  Harvey bounced back in San Diego on August 18, giving up just two runs in six innings his next start, with no walks and six strikeouts, but getting a no-decision. But on Saturday, August 24, the Tigers knocked him around for thirteen hits in 62/3 innings. He gave up only two runs, but it was not a Matt Harvey–like performance.

  Team physician David Altchek examined Harvey that Monday. At 1:23 p.m. he sent Alderson a text.

  “Sandy, just saw Matt—can you call me at the office?” he wrote.

  This was not the kind of text any GM ever wants to see, and Alderson, predictably, felt a sense of “foreboding” when he called and heard the bad news: Harvey had a torn ligament in his elbow and would in Altchek’s opinion require surgery.

  It was a huge punch in the gut for
the whole organization. Harvey had electrified the season with his talent and command. He embodied the sense of hope for the future. “I was enjoying the season up to the point where Harvey got hurt,” Alderson told me. “Our trajectory was upward. We’d been playing well. There was a lot of enthusiasm for our young players. They were developing. Harvey was pitching great. Wheeler was pitching better than most people expected him to pitch this early in his career. Niese was back, the whole rotation was solid, the bullpen was pitching well, and d’Arnaud had just arrived. Lagares was playing great in center. We were getting some contributions from other guys. Then Harvey got hurt and the conversation changed immediately to the doom and gloom of the Mets’ history with injuries.”

  Harvey did not immediately agree to have Tommy John surgery, thinking he might try to rest and rehab instead, citing the example of Roy Halladay. Alderson doubted avoiding surgery was going to be an option, but it was hard to force Harvey to accept the inevitable. He had a deer-in-the-headlights look when they met to discuss what to do, Alderson told me. One issue was that doctors did not always give players as blunt a report as they did team officials. As a result, the Mets had a communication issue on their hands—and Alderson got involved, personally writing the Mets’ press release on Harvey and his choice to try rest before making the decision for surgery, then showing it to Harvey and his agent, Scott Boras.

  “I drafted the release and we ran it by Matt and our lawyers and ran it by Scott,” Alderson said. “Our doctor was pretty blunt with Matt: ‘You’ve got to have the surgery.’ But Matt didn’t want to have the surgery.”