Baseball Maverick Page 27

  By early December the Mariners had emerged as a potential suitor for Cano, putting the Mets in a tenuous position. I asked Alderson on December 5 if the Cano option was off the table by then. “I think so, yeah,” he said. “I told the agent: ‘If you’re still looking for 200-plus, we’re out.’ Seattle has been mentioned as a possibility, but I still think he’ll end up with the Yankees.”

  Instead, the Mets turned to Curtis Granderson, who’d missed most of the previous season with two freak injuries, but had belted forty-one homers for the Yankees in 2011 and came back the next season with forty-three. He didn’t hit for average but did draw a lot of walks, so if he could bounce back from his injury-marred 2013 season, he could shape up as a prototypical Alderson player. The announcement came on December 9 that the Mets had signed Granderson to a four-year deal worth $60 million. Four days later, the Mariners made the stunning announcement that they were paying Cano $240 million to come to the Pacific Northwest.

  In signing Granderson, the Mets were hoping for an infusion of outfield power and clearly looking to him to provide veteran leadership and an upbeat attitude. “The game’s still got to be the same way as when you played it when you were a little kid,” Granderson told me the following spring, “because if it’s fun, then you’re going to want to work, and once you work, then you start to get the results, and once you get the results, that’s more fun again, and that cycle continues all over again. I get a chance to play baseball. It’s interesting when it comes like tax season time and it asks ‘occupation’ and I get to write down ‘baseball player.’ And I think the person outside is going to laugh at this, but that’s my job and it’s cool to say that.”

  A day later, the Mets announced they were signing forty-year-old Bartolo Colon, a workhorse for the A’s in 2013 with 190 innings pitched and an 18-6 record, to a two-year deal worth $20 million. Colon was an oddball in many ways, starting with his rotund physique, but he’d been the ace of the Oakland staff. Colon knew how to pitch. He was described as a control pitcher, which was true to a point, but it did not explain his wizardry. He threw a higher percentage of fastballs than any pitcher in the league, but he had a full bag of tricks when it came to varying the speed, direction, and rotation of his pitches. He kept hitters off-balance. He kept his own defense on their toes because they knew the ball would be put into play.

  The punch line for that offseason, good for a laugh at almost any juncture, was Stephen Drew, whose saga offered a case study in how, even in an age of alleged pinpoint accuracy in statistical analysis, a mediocre player could be talked up as a blue-chip talent by his very clever agent, Scott Boras, who actually seemed to get sportswriters to react to his repeated head fakes. Stunning! But also quite funny!

  It was true the Mets would love to have upgraded at shortstop going into the 2014 season. Rubén Tejada, in showing up to 2013 spring training out of shape and overweight, in playing at times like a guy taking a phone call as he was drifting toward a pop-up, had raised questions about his basic commitment to excellence and that was a damning offense. The Mets could fill the need from their farm system with more time, but an immediate upgrade would have made a statement about the team being competitive in 2014; however, whether Drew would have actually translated into more wins for the Mets was highly debatable.

  The tone was set early that offseason on Drew. Talks between Alderson and Boras had not always been civil. In fact, many years ago Alderson had once told the agent to fuck off and hung up on him. These things happen. Not a big deal. Boras preferred to go directly to owners whenever he could, it was known as his MO, and in December 2013 he had a call with Jeff Wilpon to discuss the Mets’ interest in signing Drew as a free agent. This was soon after his talks on Drew with Alderson had hit an impasse.

  “Stephen Drew is a long shot for us,” Alderson told me that December 13, mentioning in passing that his talks with Boras had grown somewhat tedious and were yielding no progress. Alderson was aware that Boras had talked to Jeff Wilpon several times directly, trying to make a case for Drew, and was disparaging Alderson in the process. In dealing with other teams, it might work for Boras to try the whole end around, but it was not going to work in this case. So soon Alderson was back on the phone with Boras himself for excruciating conversations in which the agent attempted to make the case that a decent-fielding shortstop with a little pop but mediocre on-base percentage warranted a three-year-deal minimum worth well north of $10 million a season. They kept talking. Finally Boras budged—a little.

  “The whole Stephen Drew thing keeps dragging on,” Alderson told me on February 10. “Interesting, Scott has cut his years from three to two, but he’s still looking for $13, $14 million a year.”

  This was all said just so, all the better to appreciate the absurdity of it.

  “Is this guy worth $11 million more than Rubén Tejada?” he asked in a deadpan voice. “We’ve done the analysis. It’s hard to say yes.”

  The Mets had their own numbers, but here were some out in the public realm: So far in their big-league careers to that point, they had about the same batting average, Drew holding a narrow edge at .264 to .259, much of the same story in on-base percentage, only six-thousandths apart at .329 to .323, both squarely in the range of “not very good.” Drew showed some power, hitting ninety homers over his 936 big-league games to that point, and Tejada had only two in 345 games, but it wasn’t like Drew was a big power guy, the one exception being 2008 when he hit twenty-one homers. Drew’s slugging percentage and OPS were clearly better than Tejada’s, but it wasn’t even clear his defense would be much of an upgrade. Yet on sports talk radio and among some media personalities, the drumbeat continued: The Mets had to sign Stephen Drew to show they were serious about competing! They had to throw money away, just to get media types to back off!

  18

  THE NINETY-WIN

  CHALLENGE

  Consider the plight of the Mets by 2014: The club’s payroll of right around $85 million represented not only a vertiginous dip from the $149 million payroll in 2009, the second highest in baseball behind the Yankees, two years before Alderson’s first season as general manager; but it was the lowest for the team in fifteen seasons, going back to 2000 when it checked in with a payroll of about $79 million. The small-market A’s checked in with a payroll of less than $32 million in 2000. Now fast-forward to 2014: The Dodgers loomed at the top of the pile with an Opening Day payroll of more than $235 million, followed by the Yankees at $203 million and the Phillies at $180 million. Sixteen of baseball’s thirty franchises had payrolls over $100 million, and seven were over $150 million. The Mets started the season ranked twenty-second in baseball, with a payroll only a few million more than that of the A’s (twenty-fifth).

  Fan reaction had been somewhat mixed, but Alderson was pleased the Mets had signed Curtis Granderson, Bartolo Colon, and Chris Young. The moves, more offseason activity than the Mets had shown in years, were well shy of blockbuster, but were not meant to be all the team did. Adding Colon to the rotation and Granderson and Young to the lineup had the Mets closer to where they wanted to be, but still not there. The Mets went hard after former A’s closer Grant Balfour, but couldn’t quite get it done.

  “We got the payroll up over $85 million, which everyone was waiting for us to do or not to do,” Alderson told me over the phone on February 10, shortly before he left for Florida for 2014 spring training. “It sure would be nice if we could add to our bullpen. The perception of the team would be completely different. Right now people think we’re incomplete, and you know, they may be right.”

  Fred Wilpon dropped by Alderson’s office at Citi Field that week and they did a little brainstorming on how to shift the culture around the team. It was a familiar problem, often discussed, but Alderson kept turning ideas around in his head and went to Google to do a little research. What comes up when you type in a search for “winning cultures”?

  Among what he turned up was a December 19, 2013, Harvard Business Review blog post by
Michael C. Mankins on “The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture,” which culled such tidbits from its research as the following: “There is strong ambition focused on objective measures of success, either versus the competition or against some absolute standard of excellence.” A May 2013 Inc. article by Brent Gleeson on “5 Ways to Create a Winning Culture” argued, “A strong culture isn’t something you wish into place, or even will into place. It’s something you build.” Gleeson cited lessons from the Navy SEALS, including, “Set the right goals and constantly raise the bar” and “Focus on results and build accountability.”

  “If you Google ‘winning cultures,’ you come up with a bunch of New Age stuff, but you come up with things that all make a little bit of sense,” Alderson told me. “If you do the research, one of the components of winning and sustaining a winning culture is by establishing very high goals, then holding yourself and other people accountable for those goals over time and measuring progress.”

  He flew down to Florida soon after our February 10 call and attended a meeting of the coaching staff, front office, and ownership to discuss players. This was Alderson’s fourth spring training as general manager of the Mets and everyone knew the drill. Alderson and his lieutenants were all about process—crisp, clean, orderly, and reproducible process—and even when it came to meetings, that translated into a lack of variables. Meetings started on time. They were not dull—too much was at stake for that—nor were they scripted. But the participants knew what to expect. Others would speak, and then it would come down to Terry Collins and Sandy Alderson, playing off each other, mixing blunt talk about some of the organization’s limitations with optimism for the season ahead. These were words as incantation, since to an overwhelming extent everyone was on the same page with a common perspective on the challenges of the season ahead. No one needed a reminder that Harvey was out of the picture until the following year. What they did need, though, was a good-natured, crank-’em-up kind of kick in the ass, and that was what the former Eighth and I Marine gave them.

  “We shouldn’t just try to be better,” Alderson told the gathering. “Let’s have the mind-set that we’re going to go out and win ninety games. When we wake up and look in the mirror, let’s make our goal to play like we’re trying to win ninety games.”

  Everyone understood that Alderson was focusing not on any number, but on a mentality, one that was both basic and powerful: Let’s shift our way of thinking. Let’s demand the best of ourselves. Let’s make a sharp mental break with the struggles of past seasons and put everything we have into winning as many games, right now, as the team can. As such the words were neither jarring nor surprising to anyone in the meeting, the context fully understood, but then Fred Wilpon, according to a New York Daily News article by John Harper, tossed out his own addendum to Alderson’s message.

  “We better win ninety games,” Wilpon reportedly said.

  On one level it was a mere throwaway line. Wilpon, the former competitive athlete, expected a winning team. As his longtime close friend Bud Selig told me in discussing Wilpon’s intense competitiveness, “If you don’t want to win, you ought not to be in this business.”

  Still, given the Mets’ payroll, their reliance that season on young, unproven talent and a small number of free-agent additions, it seemed a stretch to demand ninety wins.

  For those at the meeting, the talk of ninety wins did not leap out as an important detail. Alderson was not focused on the immediate reaction to his words; he cared that throughout the organization, from players to coaches to the higher echelons, a clock was ticking. Mediocrity, sloppiness, and underachieving would no longer be tolerated. The media lens had its way of altering that message.

  “Alderson probably knows that most Mets fans are likely to scoff at the notion and dismiss it as delusional or disingenuous,” Harper wrote. “Personally, I don’t believe the Mets have a prayer of winning ninety games this season, but on the other hand, it’s about time ownership and management raised the bar on what is and isn’t acceptable after five straight losing seasons. Likewise, if this is an indication that they’re going to start holding people more accountable in all areas, well, why not?”

  But for its headline on the back cover of the tabloid, the Daily News chose LINE IN THE SANDY and the subhead “Alderson digs in, tells Mets brass team should win ninety games in 2014.”

  I was in Florida not long after the article appeared and asked Alderson what he thought of the headline.

  “It was misleading,” he told me. “The reporting is that I’ve ‘predicted’ ninety wins, I’ve ‘guaranteed’ ninety wins, we ‘should’ win ninety. It wasn’t stated that way. It was really a challenge to change the mind-set.”

  We watched a Grapefruit League game together, and I tried to get Alderson to show me some excitement over Syndergaard. He wasn’t biting. Again and again, he wanted to discuss a pitcher named Jacob deGrom, who sounded to me like some Flemish painter I should have heard of but hadn’t. Come to think of it, the gangly young pitcher even looked like a Flemish painter, with his shock of long dark hair, the intellectual-in-a-coffeehouse facial hair (was he trying for a goatee? a Van Dyke?), and the pale, thoughtful expression. DeGrom was a converted shortstop who had started pitching only a few years earlier, so it was hard for me to take him very seriously. How many six-foot-four beanpoles remake themselves in short order to go from infielder to a big-league rotation? What were the odds? But Alderson was excited telling me about his potential.

  “He’s continued to make progress in the system,” he said. “He was promoted to Triple-A last year for a spot-start and pitched so well he stayed in the Las Vegas rotation for the rest of the season.”

  As annoyed as Alderson was discussing the Daily News back cover that day, it was clear to me as an interested observer that he’d helped his cause with the hullabaloo. Some people were convinced Alderson had taken a hit, on the argument that his ninety-win comment came across as cynical; there were always going to be people who connected the dots however they wanted and arrived at unsupportable conclusions. To some in New York, Alderson might have come off as unserious and even flaky, given the disconnect between the team’s low payroll and any perceived guarantee it would be a playoff team. But so what? If the larger message reached fans and media that Alderson was pissed off enough to draw a line in the sand and demand accountability, how bad was that? In the larger picture, Alderson’s reputation was going to rise or fall on the Mets’ win-loss record, not on snarky or sarcastic online commentary about a quote attributed to him after the fact. The one real risk to Alderson was that if the team bumbled through the season, he was going to be mocked far and wide for his ninety-win line in the sand. But again, so what? If they were that bad, he was going to be mocked anyway.

  It’s very New York to celebrate one’s toughness, and then mock new ideas and turn out in the end to be a follower. This is part of the charm of New York sports fans; they grunt and scream and yell, but they also turn on a dime. Alderson did not have the luxury, given the task before him, of worrying if strangers insulted him based on caricatures of his actions or words. That went with the territory. Going back to his Oakland days, he had a track record of being more likely than most leaders to try out different ideas. Changing a culture was not easy; it required openness to an array of different approaches.

  “Because I really believe in metrics, the more specific we can be about what we’re going to accomplish and how we’re going to do it, we’re better off, so something as specific as a number has more meaning,” he told me. “Would you say eighty-two? Would you say eighty-five? Those are not playoff numbers. So ninety is the default number… . You set a number, a high number, a reasonably high number but one that you know if you hit, you’re probably in the playoffs, but the derivative of that is: ‘OK, guys, here’s what we have to do as a team.’ You could even do it on our own Pythagorean basis, for saying, ‘OK, we have to end up plus-seventy-five runs in order to get to ninety wins.’ Well, that means we c
an only give up so many, we’ve got to score so many. But how do we score more runs? Or how do we give up fewer runs? Or what is the goal for Daniel Murphy? So it works its way down, but it starts with a notion that is not so abstract that it’s meaningless.”

  19

  DON’T THINK

  At one level many of Alderson’s choices could be understood only if one had genuine faith in numbers. A number can be a useful tool for enhancing knowledge; it is not, however, a club to bludgeon all other indicators. Alderson and his brain trust liked to look at fundamental problems the Mets faced and play around with possible solutions. Here was one set of numbers they looked at: 41-40. That was their record on the road in 2013. Here was another: 33-48. That was their record playing home games at Citi Field. The disparity was bizarre and it demanded countermeasures. Alderson was not necessarily after scientific certainty; he did not need to be able to prove that those numbers shifted through any particular step he or others with the team took. He just needed movement.

  During 2014 spring training Alderson had gone to a dinner with Jeff Wilpon, Terry Collins, John Ricco, and a group of key veterans, starting with David Wright, the team captain, as well as Jon Niese, Daniel Murphy, Dillon Gee, Curtis Granderson, and Bobby Parnell. Topic A at this dinner, organized well in advance, was the riddle of why the Mets fared better on the road than they did at home. Teams are supposed to win more often at home, before their fans, but the Mets were fifteen games under .500 at Citi Field. Why was that? Why were the Mets 103-140 at home from 2011 to 2013? All participants were encouraged to brainstorm explanations and possible solutions.