Baseball Maverick Read online

  “On the road by nature there are not a lot of distractions and here there’s a lot of people tugging at you for different things,” John Ricco pointed out.

  As anyone who has followed a baseball team around from city to city can attest, the difference in locker-room dynamics between New York and places like Detroit or Kansas City was profound. The Alderson solution was to limit access to the Mets clubhouse to try to make home games more like road games. “A big part of that, coming out of that, was to try to establish a time period leading up to the game where the players have uninterrupted time amongst themselves in the clubhouse where they could each prepare collectively or individually,” Ricco explained.

  “There are always distractions in New York,” Alderson says. “Can you say hello to this person? Can you do this? You never get to focus on the game. We’re going to try to create a distraction-free environment, maybe change the pregame menu a little bit so that we don’t end up giving them a six-course meal half an hour before game time. We’re going to throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see if it changes anything. Maybe something will stick and we’ll win a few more games.”

  Avoiding certain kinds of heavy foods before performance is actually basic good sense, something that U.S. men’s national soccer coach Jürgen Klinsmann pays close attention to as well. But fans pay to follow teams and are emotionally invested in every up and down of their team, so they have every right to make a few jokes about something new being tried. Jared Diamond wrote a Wall Street Journal article in early April 2014 about some of the changes and the target of faring better at home. “In the past, the team would provide a light meal and snacks when the players arrived to work, consisting of salad and sandwiches,” Diamond wrote. “Then a larger meal, more akin to dinner, was served after batting practice, which ends about two hours before a 7:10 p.m. game. After consulting the team nutritionist, they reversed the menu this year, with the heavier food coming out before batting practice. Teams eat this way on the road because they hit second, leaving them with little time between batting practice and the game.”

  The article and its news flash about Mets players being served less food set off a hearty round of good fun.

  “Memo from Jeff: How much do we save if we have the players bring bag lunches to home games?” came one quip at an online fan site.

  “Bartolo Colon’s trade request coming in 3 … 2 … 1.”

  Another area where the Mets were happy to experiment, even if it might lead to more sarcastic cracks from the peanut gallery, was in pursuing an intense offseason fitness program. Specifically, they offered to split the costs if players would fly up to Michigan in the dead of winter to engage in very intense fitness training. The Mets wanted to see what could come not just of better strength training, but just as important, better flexibility and biomechanics. This was an area where any effort to bring change faced heavy resistance. Veteran players, who had an understandably proprietary attitude toward their bodies, like violinists with their instruments, usually thought that whatever they were doing must be right. Organizations often let the whims or prejudices of their personnel dictate what programs would be employed in the offseason. The Mets were looking to put in place a framework that would, over time, translate into a systematic approach to maximize the potential not just of every big-leaguer on the roster, but every player in the system as well, through a combination of activity-specific stretching and training—year-round, highly specialized strength work; offseason work on biomechanics to improve efficiency of movement—and a far more all-encompassing approach to fitness and mental health.

  The question when it came to strength training was how to find a way for players to add strength without sacrificing flexibility and suppleness, especially considering that over the course of the 162-game regular-season grind, maintenance of strength was as much as you could hope to achieve. The obvious answer was to make more use of the offseason. A generation earlier, most players took it easy from the World Series to pitchers and catchers. Some played winter ball. Those who trained usually focused on a gradual ramping up to February, doing a little running or treadmill work so their bellies didn’t balloon too much.

  The Mets decided to experiment with a far more vigorous kind of intervention, thanks to the efforts of Jeff Wilpon, who grew up a big fan of the University of Michigan football team. His father, Fred, was a good left-handed pitcher growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, like his friend Sandy Koufax, and earned a full-ride scholarship to pitch for Michigan. He gave up baseball after his first year there, but earned his degree and has over the years been a very active booster for Michigan sports. The Wolverines play games at the Wilpon Baseball and Softball Complex. During the 2008 Michigan football season, Jeff Wilpon approached the team’s new strength and conditioning coach, Mike Barwis, and introduced himself. Barwis had an interesting background, including a purported 36-0 record in mixed martial arts competition, which definitely gave him an aura to the athletes he was coaching. As one Michigan player told the Toledo Blade, “He’s a former MMA fighter and can kill any one of us if he wanted to with one punch.”

  Soon after Alderson was hired as Mets general manager, he and Jeff Wilpon visited Michigan to check out Barwis’ facility and get to know the man. Barwis, originally from Philadelphia, studied at West Virginia University’s School of Medicine, earning an undergraduate degree in exercise physiology, and then picked up a master’s in athletic coaching before spending more than a decade as WVU’s director of strength and conditioning. His program is based on his understanding of the physiology of sports, with much talk of how cells respond to different stresses, and in line with advances in technology (he tailors workouts closely based on data gleaned from fitness-tracking technology). Nutrition and diet, including supplements, are also part of his program.

  “Barwis is a progressive guy,” Alderson says. “He understands the science and he has a very dynamic personality.”

  You almost have to be a character to make a name for yourself as a trainer, but Barwis has done that and more. He’s a great interview, with his growly voice and penchant for surprise, as when he told a reporter he’d bottle-fed and raised two wolf cubs. He even landed a gig starring in his own reality TV show on the Discovery Channel, American Muscle.

  “Mike Barwis presides, and, from the look of things, if you’re given a choice between doing his workout and being tortured by Jack Bauer of ‘24,’ Jack is the less stressful option,” Neil Genzlinger wrote in a July 2014 New York Times article.

  The Mets decided to give his ideas a shot. Starting in late 2013, they would encourage some of their young players to go to Plymouth, Michigan, to work out with Barwis. Among the young Mets who agreed to leave their homes in warm places to hunker down in snowbound Michigan for Barwis’ “special breed of hell” were Rubén Tejada, Lucas Duda, and Wilmer Flores, a Venezuelan the Mets had signed as an amateur free agent in 2007, mostly because they liked his bat. From the time he was playing youth baseball, Flores always stood out for his offense, not his defense. “You know those guys who, every time the ball is hit to them, they field it no problem? I was never that guy,” Flores says. Even as a youth player, he’d played some shortstop, but had been sent to the outfield. The Mets thought Flores could probably hit at the major-league level, but he’d batted just .211 in 95 at bats for the Mets in 2013, with an OPS of.542.

  “Typically what happens with old-school baseball is that guys change position based on their ability to play defense, as opposed to their ability to play offense,” Alderson told me in 2014 spring training. “We move them to a position where they’re no longer an offensive plus, so now what do you have? We keep moving Flores because he can’t do this and he can’t do that. Boom, he’s a first baseman. Well, he doesn’t hit for power, so he doesn’t profile at first. The rationale behind this Michigan program was to see if we can’t get players in condition to handle, in his case, a different position. Can we reverse this trend toward first base? He started at shortstop and he
just didn’t have the quickness and the agility.”

  Tejada had the most to gain in accepting the Mets’ suggestion to make the trip to Michigan, having disappointed many in the organization by showing up to spring-training camp in 2013 looking sluggish and thick in the middle. Alderson ripped his work ethic on a radio show, saying it was like “pulling teeth” to get him to put in extra work, so here Tejada was, putting in extra work. Duda was smart enough to see 2014 as a potential year of transition, a time to transfer vague potential into actual accomplishment, but above all a time to turn themselves into better ballplayers. They didn’t care whether the Michigan program was mocked in certain quarters as “fat camp.” Try saying that to Lucas Duda’s face. They wanted results and were willing to work for them.

  In late January, shortly before he went down to Florida for spring training, Alderson talked about the challenges of knowing which way to lean in the Mets’ ongoing first-base conundrum, ultimately boiling down to a choice between betting the future on Ike Davis, the sentimental fan favorite, or going with Lucas Duda. “Meanwhile,” he said at one point, “Lucas Duda is up in Michigan working his butt off in these offseason workouts.”

  Alderson had hired the first mental performance coach in baseball, bringing in Harvey Dorfman to work with minor-leaguers in the A’s organization in 1984, and Dorfman had worked with many Mets players before his death in 2010. Going into the 2014 season, at the behest of Fred Wilpon, Alderson sought to hire a mental skills coach for the Mets. Dr. Jeffrey Foote, whose extensive expertise included a stint as chief of the Smithers Addiction Treatment and Research Center, had put in eleven years as Mets team psychologist and did so without once having his name in the New York Times, but he was moving on by his own choice, so there was an opening.

  Often sports franchises put psychologists to work primarily in the area of what’s called EAP work, for Employee Assistance Programs. They emphasize mental health, in the sense of treating mental illness and addiction, as opposed to focusing on building up mental skills the way one can build up one’s forearms or biceps. Jonathan Fader, an assistant professor of family medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, had been working with minor-leaguers in the Mets system since 2008 as an EAP counselor. Hired originally in part because he spoke Spanish, Fader “sort of came up in the system the same way our players do,” he told me. By 2014 Alderson was ready to have him work with big-leaguers on their approach to all aspects of the game.

  Fader grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, rooting for both the Yankees and the Mets, but increasingly for the Mets. “My dad was always steering me in an open way toward the Mets,” he says. “I have very vivid memories of watching the ’86 Mets as a preteen and that being formative in terms of my childhood perceptions of what baseball was.”

  Fader stayed in New York for his undergraduate studies, attending NYU, but wound up on the West Coast for his graduate studies, pursuing his PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he studied with Ron Smith, the school’s director of clinical training, who had also spent twelve years working in the Houston Astros organization developing a psychological skills training program. That was Fader’s first exposure to sports psychology, and ever since he’s made it a major focus.

  “My interest is in helping people to find their own fire,” he told me. Fader views Harvey Dorfman as the central pioneer in his field whose example he looks to uphold and build on. “For his time, he was absolutely prescient,” he says. “From my perspective, he was someone who was really an emissary for what we do. Sometimes I talk about sports psychology as being like anthropology. Maybe I’m an athlete, but I’m certainly not a major-league athlete. You can’t just go in there and say, ‘This is how you should think about this.’ You have to go in and make relationships, like anything else.

  “If you’re not really interested in the person first, then you’re kind of missing it. People have to know you’re really there to help them. That’s analogous to therapy in general. There’s so much research that shows that if people don’t feel like you’re in their corner, it doesn’t matter about your worldview or what you have to sell… . In our field, there are a lot of questions about, is it the person or is it the technique? Harvey was both. In my mind he was just a total talent at connecting with people. It wasn’t like you were talking about mental skills training; you were talking about how to be a better version of yourself.”

  Having come up through the minor leagues, Fader had nurtured longer-term relationships with many players and they felt they could trust him, which is essential to any meaningful conversation about the pressures that come to bear on a professional athlete, particularly the unique set of pressures that come with putting on a Mets uniform. Having the support of Fred and Jeff Wilpon was essential. “I have a good relationship with them,” he says. “I’m thankful they’ve seen it’s important and given it a good shot.”

  Fader’s primary message for big-league athletes boiled down to: Don’t think.

  Or “Thinking is horrible,” as a player once put it to him.

  “Essentially what we’re trying to do in sports psychology is helping people to not think,” Fader told me. “When we’re talking about hitting a baseball, whatever hitting philosophy you have, it can kind of cloud your actual adjustment when you’re in the box. Whether it’s selectivity, or aggression, you can have your plan, and then when you’re in the box, you’re trying to be nonpsychological. We focus on having people learn routines and methods, so they can get in the box and forget it all and be the talented athlete they are. It could be meditation, it could be breathing, it could be visualization, all sorts of things that help you not to think. What we work on with athletes is really having a singular focus. It can be done with anything that shuts the mind down and lets go.”

  The tradition of the LOL Mets was so deeply ingrained into the realities of New York that mockery and dismissive laughter were never far away. Losing Matt Harvey for a year was in this sense like losing a rudder; as valuable as he was as a stopper, the bulldog starting pitcher you could run out there to end a brief losing streak and get the club back on track, Harvey’s combination of swagger and talent and charisma was also a great defense against ridicule. The man might hunger a tad too overtly for what the athletes call notoriety, but put him on the mound and conversation stopped: Everyone had to watch. That perpetual background noise around the Mets of press box–style wisecracks, and indeed actual press box wisecracks as well, had a way of vanishing when Harvey was being Harvey. Without him in uniform the Mets were far easier to mock. Alderson’s “Line in the Sandy” distracted at least some potential critics from focusing on how much was already laughable about the team a few weeks into spring training.

  All you had to do to make sport of the Mets was to focus on their first-base situation. A decent trade never came together for Davis or Duda, maybe not that huge a surprise given their numbers in 2013: nine homers for Davis, fifteen for Duda, and thirty-three RBIs for each, all with nearly exact at bat totals. “What I’m trying to suggest to people is if we don’t get what we want, we’re going to take them both to spring training,” Alderson told me on January 9. “That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.”

  All that offseason when Alderson and I talked on the phone, I’d ask about interest in Davis and the replies were invariably curt.

  “There are two teams interested in Ike, Pittsburgh and Baltimore, and they’re both trying to get him for nothing,” he told me February 10. “If you take his numbers, and compare what other people are paying for first basemen, he’s a valuable asset. There’s no power in the game.”

  The Pirates were interested—but there were complications.

  “They’re still mad about what they gave up last year for Marlon Byrd,” Alderson said. “They think they overpaid, but Marlon got them into the playoffs last year! He was outstanding for them. And we got a low-A second baseman and a reliever who could be good but may not be. T
hey’ve gotten a little chippy! I don’t think anything is going to happen with Pittsburgh.”

  So it was back to Alderson’s plan B of going into spring training with both Davis and Duda and letting an old-fashioned spring-training competition decide the issue. For all the speculation about how it would be awkward and pathetic, none of that would matter if Duda or Davis showed up in Florida and staked a strong claim on the job. Josh Satin had also played himself into the mix in 2013, hitting .279 with enough walks to jack his on-base percentage up to .376, a righthanded bat who could platoon with one of the two lefties.

  Alderson had mentioned the Davis-Duda competition could even generate a nice story line, and the prediction proved accurate—­at first.

  IKE DAVIS AND LUCAS DUDA SHINE AT THE PLATE IN FIRST SPRING TRAINING GAME was the Newsday headline from Port St. Lucie on February 28. “Davis and Duda arrived here as equals, thrust into a competition for the starting job at first base,” Marc Carig reported. “And Friday, as the Mets dropped their Grapefruit League opener to the Nationals, 5–4, each proved eager to stake his claim. Duda ripped a double after being robbed of an extra-base hit, delivering the two hardest-hit balls of the afternoon—until Davis raised the stakes. When Nationals righthander Christian Garcia left a breaking ball over the plate, Davis was ready, sending a two-run homer into the rightfield berm.”

  It could have been a great draw for fans, watching two power hitters try to outdo each other whacking home runs in Grapefruit League games, but in that fine tradition of laughable Mets misadventures, their two candidates were in effect no-shows. Both Davis and Duda were on the shelf with injuries in no time, derailing the competition. Sometimes when it comes down to a choice between two comparable players, if detailed analysis of the numbers does not yield a clear verdict, tiebreaker considerations could come into play, like makeup and personality. As it happened, Davis and Duda were both widely liked but very different personalities.