Baseball Maverick Page 26
Was it rare for him to write a press release himself?
“I don’t draft every press release,” he said. “In a year I’ll probably do four or five, max. If I’m going to have to expand on the press release anyway, doing a draft helps me to organize my own thinking.”
The news on Harvey’s future was devastating and scary, but then a strange thing happened: The sky did not fall. As recently as a year or two earlier, Mets fans were so demoralized by years of losing and seeing highly paid players like Jason Bay join the Mets and contribute almost nothing, this kind of bad news would have unleashed a tornado of vitriol. Media voices used to jumping all over the Mets for another miscue or blunder would be poised to sink in their teeth and not let go. Matt Harvey, their best pitcher, was going to be out of action for all of the next season, at the very least a vicious setback, but instead of despairing, many fans instead saw it as a sign of how far they’d come. Roughly one-quarter of all big-league pitchers have had Tommy John surgery at some point, and many come back stronger than they were before. There was every reason to think Harvey—intense, young, and fit—would work hard on his rehabilitation and come back just as strong as he was.
“The injury put a dent in everything,” Paul DePodesta told me in October 2013. “But there’s so much more hope and optimism that surrounds the team than did twelve months ago and there are good reasons for that. That optimism is both external and internal. Hopefully for us the hardest slog is behind us, especially emotionally. Our future shouldn’t hinge on one player. That one player might help, and will help, when he comes back. But we have other guys. Having Zack Wheeler step up and pitch better and better, seeing Travis d’Arnaud there at the end of the year, and knowing what Noah Syndergaard and Rafael Montero are doing in the minor leagues, the Harvey injury hurt, but it’s more of a speed bump than a dead end.”
Syndergaard, six-foot-six and 240, was 6-1 for Double-A Binghamton in 2013 with a 3.00 ERA, featuring an excellent fastball. Baseball America rated him as the Mets’ top prospect, higher even than d’Arnaud, who came to the Mets in the same trade as Syndergaard. Third was Montero, more of a control pitcher, who was 5-4 with a 3.05 ERA for Las Vegas.
“The Mets believe they have as much pitching depth as anybody,” Baseball America wrote in November 2013. “For proof, they can point to the fact that their pitchers at the full-season levels finished with a collective 2.79 K-BB ratio, better than any of the other twenty-nine organizations.”
The Mets could also point to the second two-thirds of the 2013 season as offering clear signs of progress. They were 24-38 on June 14. Four days later, when Harvey and Wheeler won both games of a doubleheader in Atlanta, the season took a new direction. Juan Lagares hit better than expected and played excellent defense in center field, showing he could go back on the ball as well as anyone, sometimes spectacularly, helping jump-start the team. From June 14 onward, over the last one hundred games of the season, the Mets played .500 ball. Merely playing .500 is not enough to satisfy fans, nor is it enough to satisfy Sandy Alderson and the front office, or the owners, or anyone in the organization. But when the dust cleared, Harvey had his surgery and he was immediately proclaimed to be “ahead of schedule” on his rehab, and it started to seem like not so bad a scenario, having him back in 2015 and giving Zack Wheeler and the klatch of other talented young pitchers in the organization more time to develop.
“Matt will come back stronger, I know he will,” Wheeler told me. “He’s a hard worker and he’s going to want to prove to people that he’s strong—that’s just the way he is. He’s going to come back and win a Cy Young, that’s for sure.”
Going into the 2013 offseason, the challenges for Alderson, Ricciardi, and DePodesta were many. But at least the Harvey setback and its aftermath had given them proof of the progress they had made so far. They wouldn’t get much more time to show the system-wide improvement was real, but they could look forward to spring training 2014 in a better frame of mind than any spring since Alderson took over.
Taking a smart approach to being a GM was in many ways not that different from taking smart at bats: In both cases, preparation and focus were key, and you were always going to do better if you went in looking not with one fixed idea, like crushing the first pitch you saw for a moon shot home run, but instead stayed alert and nimble. The trade that brought Wheeler to the Mets was in retrospect a home run, and so was the R. A. Dickey trade to Toronto for d’Arnaud, Syndergaard, and Wuilmer Becerra. To continue the metaphor, in both cases Alderson and his front office got pitches they could drive—and they didn’t miss. It might not have worked out that way. Alderson was ready to take a less attractive package from the Texas Rangers for Beltrán, and when it came to Dickey, he was pleased that Toronto offered as much as it did. But in the work of building a team, the splashy moves were no more crucial than all the little stuff, call it situational hitting, the GM equivalent of getting a runner over or scoring a run with a sacrifice fly. This was the challenge Alderson and the Mets faced going into the 2013 offseason.
“It’s very easy in New York to succumb to pressure,” Wright told me. “The day Sandy got here, he said there was a plan in place. Maybe a lot of fans don’t exactly agree with that plan, or like the process it’s taken, the years that it’s taken, but Sandy sticks to his guns. He believes in the process. I believe in the process. That, I think, is one of the greatest attributes that he’s brought here. There hasn’t been an impulse buy. There hasn’t been an impulse trade. He hasn’t succumbed to the pressure that is mounting on us to put a winner on the field now. He wants to win, but he wants the winning to be sustained. He wants to build from the bottom up and make sure that when we are able to compete that we’re there for the long run.”
PART III
Line in the Sandy
Alderson (right) addresses a healthy throng of media before a Mets game at Citi Field during the 2014 season—in 2015, reporters are likely to hear more of Alderson’s edgy sense of humor.
17
HANGIN’ WITH JAY-Z
If Sandy Alderson was by the spring of 2014 gaining an acute sense of just how aggravating and nerve-fraying the job of being a major-league general manager had become, he was in part bearing the brunt of trends he had set in motion himself. Being smart was no longer a novelty. Thinking baseball challenges through in a systematic way, backed up by analytic tools and ever-greater stockpiles of data, did not set one apart. There were too many baseball front offices chock-full of smart young guys (and, finally, not only guys) who’d learned from the early excesses of the number crunchers and could use very sophisticated analysis in tandem with traditional baseball methods, like trusting a scout’s eye, and were also well positioned to gain from the biggest revolution in the game, which was not computers but cameras: So much information was now available, player performance could be reliably evaluated as never before.
Alderson knew when he accepted the Mets job that New York was going to be a whole different world than Oakland. Alderson liked the challenge of edgy New York, compared with more laid-back California, so long as a certain built-in mawkishness to the sports media culture, forever reacting emotionally on behalf of the overly emotional fan, did not become too unwieldy. The certainty of blunt, tough criticism was not the issue. The difference had mostly to do with the toxic sludge left over from year after year after year of media negativity toward the Mets.
The wonder going into the 2014 season was that the press gave the Mets as much of a break as they did. Part of it was simple disbelief. They couldn’t really be planning to hold their payroll down around $85 million, could they, despite being a team in the largest market in the country with their own cable network and a shiny new ballpark? They couldn’t possibly propose crawling into the 2014 season with a payroll among the lowest in all of baseball, could they? Maybe the excitement of one year earlier had bought a little time, Matt Harvey looking like he was ready to single-handedly deliver the franchise from the years in the desert, back to re
levance and sexy good fun. The heartbreak of Harvey needing Tommy John surgery pushed everything back a year, but that didn’t mean 2014 was over before it started. The fans would still be coming out and they had every right to expect a competitive, dynamic team. But caution about spending, extreme caution, would remain the rule.
Alderson found himself sustained through the winter by his sense of humor and the joy he’d always taken in the absurd. His own situation was in many ways absurd and he knew it. He took the job with the Mets with the expectation of being able to put in place a system that would twin intelligent baseball decision-making and talent-nurturing management structures, on the one hand, with a payroll robust enough to move forward in a timely way on improving the team. Instead, because of the way the Madoff scandal engulfed the Mets, Alderson was back to the baseball version of duct tape and ingenuity, trying to get by on less.
“Madoff wasn’t even a topic of conversation in my interview for the Mets job,” Alderson told me. “I didn’t raise it. Maybe I should have. The bottom line is, I would have taken the job anyway. It just added to the challenge. At the time I took the job our payroll was about $140 million and I thought that’s probably too high to sustain, based on attendance. We got down to $85 million.”
To be clear, the defining characteristic of Alderson’s attitude toward this shift in fortune was one of wry amusement. Maybe it was the former Marine lieutenant in him, but he took a kind of pride in shaking off even a mammoth shift in fortunes with a dry chuckle and using a fresh set of eyes to survey the landscape to take in absolutely every detail he could about the challenge now in front of him. Fresh setbacks were always a possibility.
The general manager meetings at Disney World in early November 2013 brought no breakthroughs for the Mets, who went in looking to trade one of their first basemen, Lucas Duda or Ike Davis. “The media can’t understand why we would prefer Duda over Davis,” Alderson told me on November 13. “The fact is the market prefers Duda over Davis. We could definitely trade Duda.”
The problem was none of the half dozen potential trades being discussed was very appealing from a Mets standpoint. It was not smart to do a deal just to do a deal, especially since they were still not sure which player they preferred. Alderson leaned toward Duda, but without a lot of conviction. Still, he expected to resolve the Duda-Davis question well before spring training. On November 21, he told me the Mets were still exploring their options on a trade for either player and “that could stretch to the winter meetings” in early December.
Alderson, Ricco, Ricciardi, and DePodesta had met with shortstop Jhonny Peralta during the GM meetings in Florida. Their need to upgrade at shortstop was well known and Peralta, a veteran with some home-run pop, having hit at least twenty homers in four of his nine full seasons in the big leagues, and a consistent .260-plus batter, was in many ways a good fit. It was a perfunctory meeting and Alderson came away with the sense that whoever signed Peralta was going to overpay. Even so, Alderson openly admitted to being surprised when Peralta signed a four-year, $53 million contract with the St. Louis Cardinals that month. It was one of many signs that month that teams were willing to overpay for midlevel players. That had partly to do with an infusion of money from lucrative new local TV contracts worth from $75 million up to $200 million a year, and also to do with the influence of the so-called Boston model, the approach of buying up a lot of midlevel players and hoping some of them had breakout seasons.
Even as press speculation had the Mets emulating this model, Alderson’s main focus in late 2013 was in fact Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano, one of the best hitters in baseball, who over the four previous seasons had hit better than .300 every year with more than twenty-five home runs and an average of 107 RBIs. Alderson had to play down the possibility in the press, but in fact he was deeply intrigued by the prospect of landing Cano for the Mets and saw it as a long shot, but far from out of the question. It was a little like shopping for wine: If table wine had suddenly become way overpriced, it just might be that, relatively speaking, the Vintner’s Reserve Robert Parker–blessed go-for-it bottle might in fact be more cost-effective.
It would take big money to land Cano, no question, but Alderson believed that teams were being scared away by a potentially huge asking price, and the actual outlay needed to attract Cano might be far less than expected. The wild card was Cano’s new agent, the music mogul Jay-Z, whose influence on Cano was hard to gauge. What seemed clear, though, was that, all things being equal, if the choice did not hinge on money, Jay-Z and Cano would be far more likely to sign a deal with the Mets than with some other clubs, so Cano could stay in New York, where he’d spent all nine seasons of his big-league career, a move that would make a huge splash in the media and swing the focus over to the Mets.
That was the backdrop for an intriguing Monday, November 20, dinner at a new restaurant in midtown Manhattan called NoMad. In attendance? Alderson, Ricco, and Jeff Wilpon on the Mets side, as well as Jay-Z and agent Brodie Van Wagenen, who worked with Jay-Z. Cano had turned down an offer from the Yankees, believed to be for seven years and $160 million, and some of the more hyperventilating media speculation had it that he’d end up signing a megadeal for more than $300 million. The dinner at least served to take this last figure out of the discussion.
“They’re not looking for $300 million,” Alderson told me the next day. “What a surprise.”
Van Wagenen did most of the talking, making a full presentation with PowerPoint and the various other accoutrements of such sessions. Alderson, Wilpon, and Ricco played it all as a mere get-acquainted session, sizing up Jay-Z, who was new to the sports-agent business, and trying to gauge whether a deal might be possible.
“Jay-Z was pretty nice,” Alderson said. “He wasn’t arrogant. He came across as a regular guy. I don’t even know what he sings. I couldn’t identify a Jay-Z record. It felt like just another meeting, but it’s always interesting to meet a celebrity, not because I’m a big celebrity follower, but to compare the reality with the celebrity persona.”
Earlier in our conversation, Alderson had made another reference to being a celebrity follower, albeit in a more aggravating context for him. I asked if there was an update on Matt Harvey. This was less than a month after the Mets star pitcher had Tommy John surgery performed by Dr. James Andrews on October 22 in Gulf Breeze, Florida, so I had in mind news on his medical recovery. “He went to Moscow with his girlfriend,” Alderson said.
That would be Anne Vyalitsyna, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, who had already posted pictures of Harvey and her in Red Square with St. Basil’s Cathedral in the background.
Alderson and I discussed Cano more than once in those weeks, and the idea was clearly far less of a long shot than it appeared in the press. “It would be a game changer for us,” he said. “But you realize that if it ever gets down to a reasonable number, less than $200 million and more than $150, he’d probably stay with the Yankees. I do believe he would only leave the Yankees to come to the Mets.”
Then again, Alderson cautioned, maybe talking to himself as much as to me, “If Jay-Z gets less than $200 million for Cano, I think he’s open to criticism from another agent, who can say, ‘I could have gotten more than that.’”
Alderson was serious enough about the Cano option that he told me he planned to call David Wright to discuss it, just to sound out the team captain and make sure he’d be on board with the possibility. Six days later when we talked, Alderson still hadn’t called Wright—but he had called Cano’s agent, this after telling me the week before they needed to “sit tight.” Clearly the Cano possibility had Mets people excited. Cano’s agent had put in a call to Alderson the week before and, not wanting to appear too eager, Alderson waited a few days to call back—until just before the Thanksgiving holiday.
“The conversation I had yesterday was to reiterate our interest,” Alderson told me on November 27. “The agents, having seen my comments after the meeting, assumed we didn’t have interest.”
They ended the conversation agreeing to talk again soon, but just before that, the agents asked Alderson where they were not prepared to go.
“Anything over $200 million, we’re not there,” Alderson says he told the agent.
“And he didn’t respond negatively,” he said. “That led me to believe that something less than $200 million was feasible. There’s still a pulse to this.”
Cano would be an upgrade defensively at second and he would transform the Mets’ offense. With at least “a pulse” still there, Alderson moved forward internally. “I explored things more with J.P. and Paul and John Ricco and talked to Jeff Wilpon about it,” he told me at the time. “From a strategic standpoint, just looking at what the market is doing, the inflation in prices for midrange players … Cano makes some sense for us. He’s the best player, the most consistent player. You’re not taking on performance risk. The other players who are going to cost a lot of money—not that much, but a lot—also have injury risk, but with them there’s also performance risk. It makes a lot of sense on a lot of different levels to go after Cano.”
Alderson had spoken years earlier about the importance of making exciting additions to a team. Landing Cano would have been an attention-getter and a narrative changer. It did not take much reading between the lines to understand that Alderson thought that attendance at Citi Field was only going to bounce back if the team fielded a more dynamic lineup. For a clear upgrade like Cano, Alderson would have pushed hard, if he’d seen an opening. What he couldn’t afford to do was let media hysteria influence events, which was why he made comments in the press saying the team was unlikely to sign any player to a contract worth more than $100 million. Sure, it was “unlikely.” That hardly ruled it out, but he needed and wanted to scale down expectations to preserve room for maneuver.
Understandably, given the Mets’ run of losing seasons, Alderson’s “unlikely” comment led to a fresh round of negativity in the media. The Mets had a lot of work to do, if they were going to piece together free-agent signings to upgrade the team in a significant way. For their first move of the offseason, they signed outfielder Chris Young to a one-year free-agent contract in late November worth $7.25 million. Young had batted just .200 for the A’s the year before with only twelve home runs in 107 games, but the analytics suggested to Alderson that Young could be an option in center field and would be a bounce-back candidate in 2014, despite being a thirty-year-old career .235 hitter and despite his home-run totals having declined every year since he hit twenty-seven in 2010 for the Diamondbacks.