Baseball Maverick Read online

  Davis grew up around the game and was baseball smart in subtle, interesting ways; this made him confident enough not to worry about shutting up the way most young players try to do. “I might be a different player than most,” Davis told me. “I’m sometimes brutally honest even to management. It’s not like I’m mean. Actually I just don’t lie about stuff, so I will tell them exactly what I’m feeling or what happened, where some people are more standoffish or under the radar.”

  Duda, in contrast, was very much an under-the-radar guy. He was fond of replying to reporters’ interview requests with the heartfelt lament that he was sure, absolutely sure, that he was the least interesting person in the world. I came to understand Duda’s personality a lot better when I found out he’s from Riverside, California, an hour east of Los Angeles, a place where the smog pools up thick and heavy against the San Bernardino Mountains. Like my hometown of San Jose, known as the Prune Capital of the World when I was in high school, Riverside was a place where an almost Midwestern sense of modesty ran deep. As San Jose forever suffered from comparisons to fun, cosmopolitan, world-famous San Francisco, Riverside could not avoid at least some complex about being in the shadow of zany, self-confident, sprawling, exciting, everything-goes L.A. Since I’d lived in Riverside, and spent a year writing features on Riverside people for the Press-Enterprise, I felt Duda and I had something in common.

  “There is something down-to-earth about people from Riverside,” I mentioned to Duda at one point. “It’s not Venice Beach, it’s not Hollywood; it’s a whole different world.”

  “Sure, I agree with that 100 percent,” he said. “I think, like you said, people are kind of down-to-earth there. Being from there, ­being raised there and born there, I think they are. You definitely hit the nail on the head.”

  Duda, with his blond mop of hair, his blacksmith-who-just-wants-to-get-back-to-pounding-metal look of distracted concentration, can come across as something of a puzzle in interview situations.

  The question in my mind was: Is this guy fucking with me? Plenty of guys with an easygoing exterior like Duda’s were actually kind of pissed off underneath it all, and in his utterly friendly, just so “You definitely hit the nail on the head” remark, I thought I might have detected a whiff of angry sarcasm, like: Stop asking me stupid questions and go away! Let me be!

  So I did what reporters do. I pressed on, talking about San Jose’s inferiority complex where San Francisco was concerned and how if you came from the South Bay, you had to have a kind of modesty.

  “I guess it’s in part to do with where you live and how you were raised, but I think you are right,” Duda told me in a slow, friendly tone that was anything but sarcastic, as if he were pondering my words. “Most of the people that I know from Riverside are pretty modest. I’m sure there are probably jerks everywhere you go. I think it’s in part due to how you are raised and where you are from.”

  “Would you consider that part of your self-image, though, that you’re modest, that you’re not a cocky guy?”

  “Yeah, baseball is such a humbling sport, and from a young age I think I always knew that. I always knew that you could get humbled daily in this game, so there’s really no room for ego or that kind of thing. I just try to go out there and play hard every day and win ball games.”

  Here the conversation got a little surreal, which is why I’m reproducing it at length.

  “Just on the attitude side, I’m older, but the word ‘swag’ is kind of a popular word now, and that seems very much not you,” I said.

  Duda laughed, a deep snort, and then he grinned, a little abashedly, as if it say: I got me some swag!

  “First, explain the word to me,” I said, regrouping.

  “Swag is like style, a little bit of flair,” he said.

  “So you can be modest and have swag?”

  “Sure, I think so.”

  “Do you think you have some swag?”

  “I might not be too on the flairy side,” Duda told me, “but I have 100 percent confidence in myself, so I guess that can be kind of a swag thing. Like I said, baseball is such a humbling sport. You can go 0-for-4, 0-for-8, 0-for-10 real quick and it’s kind of a tough thing. For me, it’s handling my business and going out there and playing hard.”

  In the end the spring competition was a dud, but the Mets made their choice between the two based in part on some interesting numbers. They looked not at some made-up statistic, rich in subjective interpretation, but one based on cold, hard fact: How hard did each player hit the ball? As part of the new era of baseball, the Mets paid close attention to the velocity of the ball just after it struck a player’s bat. The resulting numbers were not always determinative, it went without saying. A guy could hit the ball hard and have it go straight into the mitt of an opposing player. That could happen again and again. But the law of averages told you that, sooner or later, if a guy ripped the ball consistently, he was going to be a formidable offensive threat.

  “Both those guys were hitting around .240,” Alderson told me, “but the ball comes off of Duda’s bat at a much higher velocity and more consistently as well.”

  In the end it was, Alderson said, an easy choice—for that reason.

  20

  FIZZLE

  Travis d’Arnaud was more than a prospect. He was a key bellwether for the 2014 Mets. Going into the season, it was already clear the team was building up to a critical mass of young pitching talent, with Harvey’s projected April 2015 return looming as Zero Hour for that talent to coalesce, but pitching alone would not do it. Young Mets hitters had to develop as well. The Alderson system demanded power production and plate discipline, and for the Mets to make the leap to playoff contender, they needed to bring hitting talent along. They could go to the free-agent market to add complementary pieces, but such efforts were never going to add up to anything important unless they could build around young offensive stars. They had seen d’Arnaud as potentially just such a figure, but in 2013 he stumbled his way along to a .202 batting average, managing just one home run in his ninety-nine at bats. For a former first-rounder used to tearing up whatever league he found himself in, he had a distracted, lost air at home plate. The Mets needed his rookie campaign in 2014 to be a breakthrough. Given his added importance as the consigliere for the pitching staff, in an important sense he was the Mets. Manager Terry Collins penciled him in on Opening Day, batting seventh between Ike Davis and Rubén Tejada, and there was an air of anticipation to see how the catcher of the future would fare.

  One of the things big-league hitters understand that few of us truly do is the relative nature of time. Yes, time is in some sense linear. It flows inexorably in one direction, despite the yellowing, dog-eared sci-fi novels some of us grew up on and their cheerful imaginings of time travel. But in fact we do have far more control over time, as we perceive it, than most of us ever come to grasp fully. Jonathan Fader, the Mets mental skills coach, emphasized to each player the importance of not thinking up at the plate. What he meant, really, was not throwing the mind into gear in that churning, clunky way of frontal-lobe A-leads-to-B-leads-to-C-and-D rational thought, but instead to focus on staying within the realm of emotional truth, of simply knowing.

  “In the case of archery, the hitter and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but one reality,” D.T. Suzuki wrote in the introduction to Zen in the Art of Archery. “The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull’s-eye which confronts him. This state of unconsciousness is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill… . As soon as we reflect, deliberate, and conceptualize, the original unconsciousness is lost and a thought interferes… . Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think.”

  No one had to talk to Ba
rtolo Colon about restoring “childlikeness.” In that he was a role model to younger players. The challenge for the Mets of implementing their hitting philosophy was that, like Zen, it was a philosophy of doing, a philosophy of existence, not a philosophy of overthinking or indeed of thinking at all.

  In 2014, Travis d’Arnaud offered a kind of eerie case study in the perils of letting your brain take over. He struck out twice in the Mets’ 9–7 Opening Day loss to the Nationals on his way to an 0-for-3 day, though he did walk once and come around to score. By the end of that three-game series, a mini-nightmare for the Mets, with three straight losses and ragged outings from starters Dillon Gee, Bartolo Colon, and Zack Wheeler, d’Arnaud was 0-for-9 with five strikeouts. He was making contact and hitting the ball hard, but with nothing to show for it. The Mets finally broke into the win column against the Reds that Friday, with Jenrry Mejia giving up one run in six innings before handing the ball over to relievers John Lannan, Kyle Farnsworth, and Jose Valverde. For d’Arnaud it was another 0-for-3 with a strikeout. Manager Terry Collins gave d’Arnaud a day off to rest and clear his head, then he came back and checked in with another 0-for-3 that Sunday against the Reds, pushing his hitless streak to start the season to 0-for-15. That was enough for the Post to run a story under the headline hitless d’arnaud’s “mental approach” worries collins, offering the tidbit that Phil Linz started the 1968 season 0-for-26, the Mets’ record for start-of-the-year futility. D’Arnaud was a long way from that deep a funk, but his agony was obvious to everyone, especially his manager.

  The team hit the road for a series in Atlanta and finally the cloud lifted: D’Arnaud singled to end the skid and then, in the seventh inning, lifted a high fly to center that looked like a sure out. Instead, the wind gave it a sudden push toward the center-field fence. The Upton brothers converged in the outfield and Justin made a diving attempt, but the ball landed cleanly for a double and the Mets were on their way to a 4–0 victory. One game later, d’Arnaud added a single and seemed to be on a little bit of a roll, but by April 18 he’d posted back-to-back hitless games and his average stood at .143.

  The year before, Alderson and his brain trust had delayed as long as they could before sending Ike Davis down to Triple-A Las Vegas. This year, there would be less agonizing. D’Arnaud’s struggles had the Mets considering a demotion as early as late April. The team was playing well, though, so it was not the time for a shakeup, and d’Arnaud put together two two-hit games over the next week and had one hit in the Mets’ April 23 win over the Cardinals, putting their record at 11-10, not exactly red-hot, but for a rebuilding team, not bad at all. Alderson liked what he was seeing from his catcher of the future.

  “He’s starting to get some hits,” Alderson told me on April 24. “Maybe I’m reading into it, but he looks more confident at the plate now that he’s getting some hits. If he didn’t come out of it, we were prepared to send him to Las Vegas to figure it out.”

  The Mets were happy with their other prospect at catcher, Kevin Plawecki, their second first-round pick in the 2012 draft, chosen as a supplemental pick in compensation for having lost shortstop Jose Reyes. Plawecki was making his way up through the system, and if d’Arnaud continued to raise red flags, with his injury history and sometimes with his approach, he just might run out of time. Josh Satin and Zack Wheeler, who had both watched him hit with confidence and power at different levels of the minor-league system, were so sure it was all going to click for d’Arnaud, it seemed unwise to doubt them, but watching the team early in 2014, and hearing Alderson’s voice of caution, it was chilling to realize just how few chances the kid might get to find himself before it was suddenly too late. The previous two years, marred by injuries, had not given him enough at bats to establish any kind of continuity. In some ways he’d actually moved backward, and slipped from a Baseball America ranking of seventeenth among all prospects in baseball in 2012 to thirty-eighth going into the ’14 season.

  “In some ways it’s not surprising that a guy would struggle at the outset, given that he missed almost a year and a half,” Alderson told me that April. “But at some point, you’ve got to do it. You can’t just rely on press clippings from a couple years ago.”

  Wheeler and d’Arnaud were roommates in New York for the 2014 season, and both were off to slow starts. Wheeler was somewhere between miffed and disappointed that he wasn’t given consideration to be the Opening Day starter against the Nationals. As he put it to me that April, if Matt Harvey had not been out of action, Wheeler’s name might not even have come up. But when he compared himself with Bartolo Colon, Dillon Gee, and Jonathan Niese, he thought he had just as good a chance as any of them to pitch the Mets to victory to start the year. “I wouldn’t say I was surprised, but I’d just like to be under consideration,” he told me.

  Gee, handed the ball on Opening Day as a reward for his fine work in 2013, gave up four runs in 62/3 innings. The game went into extra innings and in the tenth inning the Nationals torched John Lannan, one of the hurry-and-watch-him-quick-or-you’ll-miss-his-turn-in-blue-and-orange turnstile-bullpen Mets of recent years, for a three-run homer that broke open the game. Bartolo Colon made his Mets debut in the second game and looked good early, but back-to-back doubles in the fourth led to one Washington run, and in the fifth Colon gave up two solo shots, including one to opposing pitcher Gio González, which was all the Nationals needed on their way to a 5–1 win in which they outhit the Mets 13–3. Wheeler, up in the third game, held the potent Nationals lineup to three runs in six innings, as Colon had done one day earlier, but wound up an 8–2 loser and the Mets were off to an 0-3 start.

  “I came in trying to be more aggressive against the Nationals,” Wheeler told me that month. “They have a lot of good hitters and they’re aggressive. I think that’s where you can tell the difference between last year and this year is my off-speed’s gotten a lot better. Maybe before I would have stuck with the fastball and an aggressive team would have handled me a little better, but I’m able to throw my changeup and curveball and slider a little bit more consistent around the zone, so I can keep them guessing. I don’t have to go out there and just try to throw fastballs by them when they are aggressive. I made one mistake and left a slider hanging. I was just messing around with like a new grip.”

  Next up was a return to Turner Field, where Wheeler had made his major-league debut ten months earlier and pitched so well. That day Wheeler’s adrenaline was pumping like mad and he threw six shutout innings. It was exciting, a life experience to savor, but it was at odds with his normal approach, which was to keep it free and easy. That’s how Wheeler would establish himself over the long grind of a season, especially now that in his second year in the bigs, he’d earned a spot, earned freedom from wondering if, like his friend and roommate Travis d’Arnaud, he might show up at the ballyard one day to get the news he was Las Vegas bound. Wheeler liked to be as cool, unflappable, and unconcerned about anything out there on the mound as his new teammate Bartolo Colon always looked. The two didn’t talk much, since Colon’s English was somewhere shy of sparse, but Wheeler watched the ageless veteran and shook his head in wonder.

  “He really doesn’t have a care in the world and I think that’s why he’s so successful,” Wheeler told me that month. “He doesn’t overthink stuff. He’s just nice, laid-back, and relaxed. That sort of reminds me of myself, actually, just laid-back, and relaxed and whatever happens, happens, really.”

  For Wheeler the challenge was not to be too laid-back at times. It’s a fine line. For someone with his talent, his effortless delivery and exploding fastball, the first lesson was to trust his stuff. He’d learned that one. Now he had to learn to trust his fastball and his breaking ball even on days when neither was at its sharpest. In his time with the Mets he was always good with men on base, always good at snuffing out a scoring threat, but he needed to snap back within at bats more often and cut down on his walks so he could go deeper into games.

  His April 2014 start in Atlanta w
as nothing like his debut there the previous June. Wheeler struck out six, but gave up four runs in his five innings. He held the Braves to no walks, but they chipped away for eight hits and broke through in the fifth. It was an 0-2 start to the season, but when I caught up with Wheeler in Anaheim two days later, he seemed anything but troubled. “I’m filling up the zone, not pitching around guys,” he told me. “I’m trying to get them to put the ball in play early.” As we spoke in a corner of the visiting-team clubhouse, Bartolo Colon and reliever Gonzalez Germen were playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek. Colon squeezed his porcine bulk just past me to hide in a corner locker, grinning as he pulled one door closed to hide himself within.

  Even if it was clear to Alderson by the start of the season that Duda was their man at first base, by April 18 it was clear to every­one. Despite his prediction that the Pirates would not make an acceptable deal, the clubs agreed that day to a trade sending Ike Davis to Pittsburgh for pitcher Zack Thornton and a player to be named later. Thornton, a six-foot-three righthander out of Los Angeles, pitched two years at Ventura County Community College and then moved on to the University of Oregon, finishing 9-0 his senior year with a 3.40 ERA, good enough for the A’s to take him in the twenty-third round of the 2010 draft. The player named later was left-hander Blake Taylor, also from California, the Pirates’ second-round pick in the 2013 draft.

  It was a relief more than anything for Davis, who had grown tired of the boos at Citi Field and the protracted suspense about his future. “You’re only as good as you play,” he told me later that season. “It doesn’t matter how good of a guy you are, if you don’t play well, you’re a villain. That’s just the way the game is. We know that.”