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  “I think the Giants wanted to see if Keppinger would be the tonic their offense needed and they could say: ‘OK, we don’t need to go after Beltrán and really give up our top guys because this guy is going to be a catalyst,’” Alderson says. But Keppinger went 1-for-4 in each of his first four games as a Giants starter—not the lift they needed.

  Throughout these weeks Alderson had regular talks with Philadelphia about a Beltrán trade, but as much as they thought they might be helped by adding the switch-hitting outfielder, the Phillies were not willing to part with the kind of top-level prospects the Mets hoped they could get. This was the stage at which Boston and Texas, both powerhouse teams with stacked lineups, became more interested in Beltrán. The Red Sox were loaded offensively, but when right fielder J. D. Drew hurt his shoulder in mid-July, Boston developed more interest in talking to the Mets. “They didn’t really have a right fielder,” Alderson says.

  “But Texas was just looking. You know, it was almost overindulgent. They had this incredible offense. They would get him and move some guys around, because they had decided they couldn’t get a starting pitcher that they really liked. They were also intent on improving their bullpen. So we’re talking now about five or six days before the deadline. Philadelphia eventually went quiet.”

  At that point the Giants had not gotten back to the Mets except to let them know they were mulling other options. That left the Mets two alternatives, Texas and Boston, who were looking at Beltrán to pad their lineup, not fill a glaring need. And in both cases, it was questionable Beltrán would accept a trade, since both teams were in the American League and he didn’t want to DH.

  Alderson broke this down later that season. His Citi Field office, beyond the outfield, still showed boards with detailed information on available players from Boston, Texas, and San Francisco, illustrating that all three were very much in the hunt for Beltrán down to the wire. Boston general manager Theo Epstein was offering infielder Chih-Hsien Chiang and pitcher Alex Wilson, along with one more player from a list of seven; plus, the Mets were going to throw in more than $1 million in cash considerations. The Mets continued to negotiate with Texas, focusing on starting pitchers Joe Wieland and Robbie Ross. The teams agreed on those two names, but the Mets wanted a third player, and asked for third baseman Mike Olt or a very young Venezuelan, Rougned Odor. “If we had gotten Olt or Odor, we would have made the trade with Texas. But they wouldn’t give us the third guy,” Alderson says.

  Boston by this point was out of the running, with less appealing options than what Texas was presenting, and the Giants seemed out of the picture, too. Rangers general manager Jon Daniels, widely respected as one of the best young GMs in the game, was pretty sure the Mets’ other options had dwindled and thought the Rangers were in the driver’s seat. Alderson called again to make one more stab at getting a third player in the deal and Daniels did add another name, but it was neither Olt nor Odor. Alderson mulled the offer and called Daniels back with news that came as a surprise.

  “We’re just not prepared to make the deal at this point,” Alderson told Daniels. “I’m going to have to call you back and let you know.”

  This looked like the best the Mets were going to do, but there was no harm in making some more calls. John Ricco, the assistant general manager, suggested trying the Giants again. In the every-hour-things-can-change pace of the week before trade deadline, the Giants and Mets had not talked in ages. So Alderson called Sabean. He needed a pretext and decided he’d say he was calling to ask if the Giants would trade outfielder Gary Brown, the third of the top prospects identified by the Mets. They’d already been offered Wheeler and asked for Belt, but had not made a pitch for Brown.

  “Well, would you consider Brown?” Alderson asked Sabean.

  “No,” came the reply. “But we’ll do Wheeler.”

  In a sense they were back to square one. They’d been in this spot more than a week earlier—but with a difference. Sabean had made clear he needed to discuss the move with Giants ownership, and when no call came back, Alderson assumed Sabean had been shot down by the higher-ups. Now the trade was back in play. Alderson pulled the trigger and made the trade. Bottom line, the Mets would have been happy with Belt, Brown, or Wheeler—Belt was their first pick, given how close he was to big-league-ready, but the Mets saw all three as among the top prospects in baseball.

  Alderson called Jon Daniels to let him know he’d made a deal with San Francisco.

  “They were shocked,” Alderson says. “They thought they had it.”

  The Beltrán trade was finalized on July 28. The Giants, so intent on landing Pence, did just that the following summer, and he ended up playing a key role in the team’s World Series championships in 2012 and 2014. Beltrán, after his short stint with the Giants, became a free agent and signed with the Cardinals in December 2011 and led them to the World Series in 2013.

  Wheeler had a feeling something was up. One constant of his life during the weeks he stayed with Joyce and Doug Morgan in San Jose was that he got his sleep. The house was big and comfortable, and Wheeler had his own room and he loved to take full advantage. “Zack doesn’t wake up before noon unless it’s absolutely necessary,” Alex Burg says. But on the morning of Wednesday, July 27, something nudged him awake early.

  “I woke up at like nine a.m., which I never do, and looked at Twitter,” Wheeler told me. “They said I was about to get traded, so I went downstairs.”

  Burg was already down there.

  “I think I just got traded,” Wheeler said.

  “Shut up,” Burg told him. “You didn’t get traded.”

  They turned on the TV and saw the scroll: Beltrán traded for prospect Zack Wheeler.

  “Holy crap, I got traded,” Wheeler said.

  They sat there stunned. Wheeler called his agent and waited to hear back. It was strange: He was scheduled to start that day and went to the ballpark, suited up, and just sat in the dugout waiting to get a call making the trade official. He was there and not there, gone and not gone. “My head was up,” Wheeler says. “I wasn’t down about it.”

  “Our family and Zack, everybody loved the Giants,” Adam Wheeler says. “It’s saddening at first, and then you move on.”

  Brandon Crawford understood the move, which may look one-sided in retrospect, but at the time was just the kind of trade you wanted your general manager to make, going for it in the here and now at a time when the team was loaded and wanted to repeat as World Series champions. Still, Crawford hated to see Wheeler go. “He was probably one of our biggest pieces in the minor leagues,” he said. “He had a great fastball. He was kind of working on his off-speed stuff still, and really locating his pitches, but you could definitely see his potential.”

  Joyce and her husband were in the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Sonora, having breakfast at Jeb’s Hill Country Cooking, famous for its waffles, when the news hit. “They had TVs in the restaurant and across the bottom it said the Giants had traded Zack Wheeler,” Doug Morgan told me. “We called home and they said, ‘Yeah, we packed him up and he’s gone.’”

  “It was hard not to be able to say goodbye,” Joyce says. “He was a very happy individual.” It went with the territory. One week you have one group of players and then the team makes some moves and you have new kids. For Joyce and Doug, part of the enjoyment of hosting young ballplayers came in keeping up with their former charges and watching them climb the ladder—or not. They’d known them when they were unformed in many ways and would always have unique insights into their personalities and character. About Wheeler, Joyce told me: “He was just really focused and you knew he was going to go places.”

  How much anyone knew or didn’t know then about Wheeler’s future was a riddle, but it was the riddle of baseball, the mystery that made the games worth watching. The Mets could not know for sure if Wheeler would grow into a quality big-league starter, but at least with the trade they’d turned some heads; for seasons to come, GMs mulling their options going into
the trade deadline would resolve not to give up as much as the Giants had in the Beltrán-Wheeler deal. The Wheeler trade offered hope for the future. It offered excitement. But for it to count as a great trade, Wheeler would have to make huge leaps forward. Alderson would have to build a championship-caliber team around him with a new attitude and a new approach, a team that could give Wheeler the chance to dominate in postseason games. Only then could a verdict on the trade be offered. The suspense was killing Alderson.

  PART I

  The Marine

  Shakes Up Baseball

  in Oakland

  Sandy Alderson saw combat as a young Marine officer late in the Vietnam War and then in the early 1970s served at the Marine Barracks in Washington, where he was being groomed to be a future high-ranking general—and was featured in this recruitment poster.

  1

  KHE SANH

  In 1955, the year the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series, a rollicking, seven-game classic against the New York Yankees, military pilot John Alderson and his young family were living on an Air Force base in Osaka, Japan, listening to the games on the radio. Four days after the Series, the Yankees set off on a six-week barnstorming tour through Asia, and when they played in Osaka, John Alderson was on hand to watch with his son, Richard “Sandy” Alderson, all of seven years old. Sandy had his eye on that day’s Yankees third baseman, a vinegary little guy from California named Billy Martin.

  “Some Americans were razzing Martin,” Sandy Alderson says now. “When he looked over to the stands to give it right back, the hitter smoked one right past him.”

  This was just ten years after the end of World War II, and for the Aldersons the fenced-in base was alienating. But for all the sense of jarring separation from the local Japanese, they did have one thing in common: baseball. Sandy attended third grade in Osaka and it was his first chance to play organized baseball. He’d been tossing the ball around with his father since he was small, but finally he was playing in real games. Baseball had been introduced in Japan late in the nineteenth century and was deeply established by the 1940s. “We would occasionally play Japanese teams,” Alderson told me. “They would kick our butt. They were much better than we were.”

  The Aldersons traced their roots back to England and Wales. John Alderson grew up not far from Niagara Falls, New York, and was a pitcher for Gasport High School, which was where he was said to have squared off against a good left-hander starting for South Park High in Buffalo by the name of Warren Spahn. On February 1, 1943, with the morning papers showing pictures of the RAF’s night bombing of Berlin and headlines about Joseph Goebbels’ “brutal” push for total mobilization of the German adult population, John enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps and learned to fly the twin-engine AT-10 at Moody Field in Georgia in preparation for flying B-24s in Europe. He joined the Forty-Fourth Bombardment Group in England, but arrived too late to take part in its most famous mission, Operation Tidal Wave, a coordinated low-altitude attack in August 1943 on nine oil refineries in Romania in which more than fifty aircraft were lost. “I wasn’t there yet, thank God, because that was a tough mission,” John told the New York Daily News. “I’m no hero.”

  Hero or not, he flew thirty-two missions in World War II. Home after the war, he enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle and of all things became a drama major. “Either he wanted to meet girls or it seemed an easier option than some other things,” Sandy explains. John set his sights on one of the stars of the department, Gwenny Parry, who grew up in Denver, her parents recent immigrants from Wales. In 1947 John had a role in the school production of The Philadelphia Story, and he may not have been able to act a whit but, based on a picture in the yearbook, at least he looked good in tails and seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He and Gwenny were soon married, and she gave birth to Sandy that November. They were living in Denver when John was recalled to duty to fly B-26 bombers in the Korean War. Sandy, his mother, and his sister, Kristy, born in December 1951, stayed behind until John was transferred to Japan.

  Next up after Japan was eight months at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois, which afforded John and Sandy the chance to go to a doubleheader at Comiskey Park, where Sandy rooted against the visiting Yankees. Later, at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, Sandy played Little League and his father coached him. John taught Sandy always to be aware of the situation. If you were on first base running to second on a ground ball, you hustled. Sandy might have learned the lesson too well. He was eleven years old and went in hard to second to break up a double-play chance—and elbowed the kid playing second. His coach flipped out. No son of his was going to play like that. John made Sandy ride the pine the rest of the day.

  In 1960 the Milwaukee Braves played an exhibition game against the Cincinnati Reds at Capital City Stadium in Columbia, South Carolina, near Shaw AFB. Sandy was starstruck to see Hank Aaron, his idol, and tracked him down getting into a cab with his teammates Billy Bruton and Wes Covington. “I knew all these guys by heart,” Alderson says. “The Braves were my team. I was a twelve-year-old kid asking for an autograph on a ball, and they signed it and gave it back.”

  Soon the family had moved again—this time across the Atlantic for three years at Alconbury Air Force Base in England. Overseeing the base’s Babe Ruth team was Ed Ellis, a colonel from Alabama who took a liking to young Alderson. Up until this time Alderson had been called Sandy or sometimes Rick. But when Colonel Ellis took to calling him “Richie,” which he hated, there was not much he could do. Soon everyone was calling him “Richie,” including the colonel’s two sons, Buster and Rip, good friends of his.

  The Alderson family left England in early 1964 when John was reassigned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, working a desk job in the U-2 spy-plane program, a staffing choice that sounds like some kind of Joseph Heller joke about the genius for ineptitude that is military bureaucracy. John Alderson as a desk jockey? John, predictably, “hated” it. Sandy tried to take the move in stride.

  “By that time we had moved so many times I had gotten used to it,” Sandy says now. “Since you don’t have any other experience and don’t know anything other than this periodic movement from place to place, it wasn’t that traumatic. But it had its impact. You develop a group of friends someplace and then go someplace else and develop a new group and the old group tends to fall by the wayside. It does make one very adaptable. That’s a positive. But it probably stunts long-term relationships as well, and that’s a negative.”

  The family decided to live in Falls Church, Virginia, where the Ellis family had also settled after leaving Alconbury. “We could have lived anywhere in the Washington area,” Alderson says, “but we ended up getting this temporary apartment in a dumpy apartment complex in Falls Church, so I could go to high school where I’d have some friends.” Alderson had a year and a half at Falls Church High, playing both football and baseball. Flipping through the school yearbook offers an intriguing glimpse: His senior picture captures a young man grappling with shyness, having come to the school long after most friendships had been formed. He’s good-looking in the scrubbed, athletic, all-American way of Good Will Hunting–era Matt Damon, his tie impeccably knotted, his dark hair just past crew cut length, his half-smile starting to form into the sort of crooked grin useful for punctuating the occasional sarcastic one-liner.

  “He was outgoing, he was social, but he wasn’t real effervescent,” says Tom Bradley, the star pitcher on the Falls Church High baseball team and Alderson’s best friend. “He fit in really well. You always do when you play a sport.”

  The two sat next to each other in algebra, taught by a retired Navy rear admiral named Stephen Tackney, whom Alderson remembers walking around the room listing to one direction. All through class, the two would smirk and wisecrack, and Bradley would keep squeezing one of those squeaky hand-strengthening gadgets. “We got thrown out of the admiral’s class a few times for talking and laughing,” Alderson recalls.

  “
He was really smart, but also a little bit of a troublemaker,” remembers the cocaptain of the cheerleading squad at Falls Church High at the time, then known as Linda Huff. “He would get Tom Bradley in trouble in Admiral Tackney’s Algebra 2 class. It wouldn’t bother him if he got kicked out of class. He still got an A.”

  One of the surprises of the Falls Church yearbook is that there is no mention anywhere of “Sandy” Alderson. He’s always “Rich.” For that he had Colonel Ellis to thank.

  “I ended up at the same high school as his kids, so I couldn’t escape it,” he says.

  “Poor kid!” remembers Linda. “He came and everybody called him ‘Richie’ and he really hated it. To this day good friends from high school call him Richie and they know he hates it. He just really didn’t like it. He tried to be ‘Rich.’ I called him ‘Rich.’”

  She still calls him Rich. Linda and Sandy started dating on Halloween night their senior year, though Alderson took her home early so he could go hang out with his friends Rip Ellis and Tom Bradley, or that at least is the way Linda remembers it. She forgave him for that lapse. They were married four years later and celebrated their forty-fifth anniversary in December 2014.

  “He changed his name back to Sandy when he went to Dartmouth,” Linda says. “I called him ‘Rich’ the first year and a half. I still call him ‘Rich,’ instead of ‘honey’ or something. I just can’t look at him and say, ‘Sandy, pass the butter,’ and we’ve been married since 1969.”

  “When she calls me a printable name, that’s what she calls me,” Alderson confirms.

  Like many his age, Alderson took a summer job after he graduated high school in 1965, but his was a little unusual: working in the basement of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is not a job he has ever disclosed publicly, prior to the publication of this book. One of the issues with the CIA was that anyone who stepped into the building at Langley had to have clearance, even low-level workers, like interns or support staff. That made it preferable for family members of those already working in the building to be brought in as employees. Since John Alderson’s assignment to the U-2 spy-plane program meant the entire family had already been vetted, the way was clear for Sandy to take a job there. Clearance levels corresponded to how high in the headquarters building you were allowed to go; Alderson worked in the basement. So if U-2 flights revealed something interesting, as they had in April 1965 when they discovered SAM-2 sites protecting Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor, that would not fall within Sandy’s sphere. Nor would he have likely been privy to wires on August 28, 1965—the day Bob Dylan was booed in Forest Hills, New York, for going electric—with information and analysis of a U.S. action in the Mekong Delta that claimed the lives of more than fifty Viet Cong.