Baseball Maverick Page 30
Davis had a good relationship with Alderson, he says, but at the same time, it had its limits. “Him compared to my first GM, Omar Minaya, definitely different personalities,” Davis said. “Sandy’s all business. You can tell he’s got lawyer skills. He’s a good guy, but he always had that line of business and friendship. Like sometimes you just weren’t able to cross that with him, which is probably a good thing because I obviously watched Moneyball and that’s actually like a point of their plan, is not to become friends with the players, because we are basically like stocks, you know what I mean? So it’s tough to really become great friends with one of your players.”
Alderson had been downcast going into spring training because he understood all too well how this was going to go: Trying to field a competitive team while sorting through their promising but mixed bag of prospects, he knew that even when it went well, still there would be setbacks, disappointments, and weird frustrations. He wanted to get breaks from losing, but he also knew the larger picture was building for the following season. So as the team surged after the Davis trade, winning seven of nine to finish April with a surprising 15-11 record, he was almost waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The Mets’ four-game series in Colorado to open the month of May would offer a good test. Bartolo Colon, the man with the body of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon bobbing down Seventh Avenue, still doing his thing though he’d be turning forty-one that month, was a cutup in the clubhouse, a man with the demeanor of a playful seven-year-old. I’d approached Colon in the Mets’ clubhouse in spring training and introduced myself in Spanish, telling him I was writing a book on the Mets. He sat there, extraordinarily immobile, and stared back at me placidly. I wasn’t asking for an interview and did not have out a notepad or tape recorder. I was just talking to him, as moments earlier I’d been talking to former A’s outfielder Stan Javier, now a general manager in the Dominican Republic, the two of us joking and laughing like old friends. Colon then grunted that he had to sign baseballs, as if this had anything to do with anything. I smiled at this, since we both knew how deeply redolent of bullshit it was, but moved away from him and there he sat, doing nothing, for the next half hour, not twitching a muscle. I mention the moment because at first I was annoyed, and then I just laughed: Colon, speaking in Spanish, English, or Swahili, was not about to give me a penetrating quote about anything. Nor was he going to do anything he didn’t feel like doing. That was the man’s genius: He didn’t think too much, and he didn’t care about anything except having a good time, making jokes, staying loose, and going out every five days and throwing a lot of darting fastballs. You could plug him in for twelve to fifteen wins and 180 to 200 innings, even on a sub-.500 team, but don’t ever expect him to go out of his way to try harder than necessary.
The first game of that Colorado series was a rare case of Colon’s attitude working against the team. His low-key ways were great going into a high-pressure game, since absolutely nothing was going to fluster him, but the simple fact is he took the mound against the Rockies like a man psyched out by the nightmarish realities of mile-high Coors Field, where a go-ahead-and-hit-it pitcher like Colon was due for a long day. It was listed as 57 degrees at first pitch, with a 17-mile-an-hour wind, and Colon was visibly off his game.
“Colon thought he was going to miss Colorado,” Alderson, who was with the team in Colorado for the series, told me that week. “It didn’t seem like he was ready.”
The Mets threatened in the first, but David Wright’s line drive led to a double play, and in the bottom half of the first Carlos González took Colon deep to make it 1–0 Rockies. The opposing pitcher, Juan Nicasio, came up in the second and singled off Colon to knock in two more runs. It was 7–0 by the fifth, all of those runs charged to Colon, and even with a late rally—including Travis d’Arnaud’s second homer of the year—the Mets couldn’t come back.
It was just one loss, not a big deal in a way, but the vibe around the team had suddenly shifted. Zack Wheeler, up next on the hill for the Mets, seemed to have adopted Colon’s I-don’t-want-to-pitch-here attitude. This was not characteristic of Wheeler, who prides himself on his preparation and his ability to maintain low-key confidence and intensity at all times. It’s just how it works. Just as hot hitting can be contagious, so can sloppy pitching. Wheeler was hammered for four runs in the first and two more in the second. By the fourth it was 7–1 Rockies and once again a too-little, too-late rally. The next day, losers of two in a row, the Mets jumped out to a 3–0 lead in the first and pushed that to 6–0 by the third with Jenrry Mejia handling the Rockies. Then in the fifth, the Curse of Colorado: an eight-run Rockies outburst, all off Mejia. The onslaught may have been enough to convince Mejia that as much as he insisted on being a starter, he might be better off taking the team’s suggestion to try a late-inning bullpen role instead. The Mets came back to tie that game twice, then rallied again to go ahead—but lost in the bottom of the ninth, a punch-to-the-stomach kind of loss all the way. Finally, behind Dillon Gee, the Mets won 5–1 in the final game of the series to snap the skid, but they were still reeling.
Alderson did not take the team flight to Florida and did not have to watch personally as the Mets lost all three of those games, their sputtering offense twice being shut out, the final game a stinging 1–0 loss that wasted five innings of shutout work from Wheeler. The team was back home at Citi Field for a weekend series with the Phillies, but Alderson was in California attending a wedding. On Friday night, the Phillies pulled out a 3–2 victory on a run-scoring double in the eleventh by former Met Marlon Byrd. For the Saturday night game, the Mets were up 4–3 through six, but again faltered late, losing another one-run decision when Ryan Howard singled in a run in the top of the ninth. The Mets had now lost five straight, falling to 16-19. It was panic time in New York—so Alderson decided to catch a red-eye back east that Saturday night.
“I thought to myself: ‘This is heading in the wrong direction,’” he told me. “I felt like I’d better get back. Twitter was lighting up about Terry’s job prospects and I was accused of hiding. ‘Where’s Sandy?’”
Telling the story on the phone, Alderson allowed himself a quick, exasperated laugh.
“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, guys. I was just at a wedding.’”
The Mets had been thinking seriously about moving Mejia to the bullpen for weeks. One thing was clear: A young pitcher as emotional as Mejia, as fueled by adrenaline and enthusiasm, tended to wear down over the innings as a starting pitcher and might fare better one inning at a time. Like so many big-leaguers, he’d grown up poor in the Dominican Republic, shining shoes for a living as a teenager, and only started playing baseball when he was fifteen. The Mets spent all of $16,500 signing him as an international free agent in April 2007, and by the end of 2009 he was cracking top fifty prospect lists, and the following year, Minaya’s last as Mets GM, he started the season in the Mets’ bullpen. He did not stick at the time, instead getting a June demotion to Double-A to remake himself as a starter. There remained a temptation to develop him as a starter, but as Alderson had been making clear to me for three years in our talks, he was not about to tolerate mediocrity in the bullpen. By May 2014 it was past time to get results.
“There are people in the organization who think Mejia is better suited for the bullpen, and they may be right,” Alderson had told me on May 6, picking up a theme he’d been touching on since spring training, the need to bolster the bullpen with young talent, not just free-agent retreads. “We’ve been letting him start in part because he wants to start. Part of the process is convincing him that the pen is a better idea. The sooner we get him into the pen, if we decide to do that, the sooner he’s going to evolve into a late-inning option. So at that point our need may trump his desire. But it will be better if we can convince him that it’s in his interests and in ours. And it wouldn’t foreclose him going back to a starting role, if that’s what happens.”
The Mets had other intriguing options to explore in
their rotation. Back in March, I’d sat with Alderson in his box at a Mets spring-training game and he kept changing the subject from Noah Syndergaard, who I wanted to discuss, to Jacob deGrom, the converted shortstop. Then I got my first look at the kid on the mound: the coltish long-limbed body, especially his legs, which had the look of stilts, lifting him up to a height of six-foot-four. How did he walk around on those skinny legs? It was hard to believe a kid with that kind of body could make it in the big leagues, given the importance of fine-tuned mechanics to a pitcher, given the necessity of repeating a pitching motion over and over with a level of easy, fluid exactitude. As great as Randy Johnson was, consistency of mechanics was not always his forte with that six-foot-ten body, and Johnson was not as scrawny as deGrom.
DeGrom had grown up on Florida’s Space Coast, playing shortstop on the baseball team at Calvary Christian Academy in Ormond Beach. He kept playing shortstop at Stetson University in Central Florida through his first two seasons, making an impression mostly with his strong throwing arm. Finally in his junior year, longtime Stetson coach Pete Dunn prevailed on deGrom to pitch for him and started using him as a Friday night starter. He did well enough that the Mets drafted him in the ninth round of the 2010 draft, but after only six starts for the Rookie League Kingsport Mets it became clear he had elbow issues and was going to require Tommy John surgery. During his year off, he worked on adding a changeup, tutored by Johan Santana, and over the next two seasons turned heads with his composure, his competitiveness, and his truly formidable arsenal. Back for the 2014 season in Las Vegas, a thin-air hitter’s paradise, deGrom quietly breezed to a 4-0 record and 2.58 ERA by early May.
The plan was to call deGrom up and give him a shot in the bullpen. As Alderson had explained back in spring training, the Mets were looking to use an approach employed by the Cardinals, which was to give talented young pitchers brief stints in the bullpen to give them big-league experience. The club gained from the infusion of talent and energy, and it was a great way to develop young talent. Instead, with Dillon Gee on the disabled list, deGrom found himself called on to make his major-league debut in Queens against the Yankees.
The Mets had first traveled to the Bronx and for the second straight year swept the Yankees on their home turf, winning not with pitching, but an explosion of offense. D’Arnaud, Granderson, Eric Young, and Chris Young all homered in a 9–7 victory, and the next day, it was Granderson and Daniel Murphy with home runs in a 12–7 win, giving the Mets six straight wins over their crosstown nemeses. Back in Queens to continue the home-and-home set, Rafael Montero made his first major-league start, but was no match for imported Yankees ace Masahiro Tanaka, who won 4–0. That set up the final game to close out the series, with the Mets looking to win behind deGrom in his first big-league start and make it two years in a row of dominating the Yankees in head-to-head action, a meaningless feat in one sense, but one that Mets fans—and front-office people—could richly enjoy nonetheless.
DeGrom was not even the most highly touted young Mets pitcher of the week. Montero claimed that distinction, and neither of them had anywhere near the level of buzz that followed Harvey and Wheeler in their climb from Triple-A to Queens, or even Syndergaard, who was running into some injury issues and ups and downs in Las Vegas that year. DeGrom took the mound at Citi Field and warmed up in the first looking like someone who had been out there countless times before, not a converted shortstop only a couple of years removed from Tommy John surgery. Showing a surprisingly languid motion, he took care of the first two Yankees batters in the first, including Derek Jeter, before giving up a double to Jacoby Ellsbury, then struck out Mark Teixeira to end the inning. He gave up a single in the second, then erased the runner with a double play the former shortstop started himself. Then in the third, overcoming his nervousness, he got on a roll, retiring eleven Yankees batters in a row. “He’s very confident,” d’Arnaud told me. “He trusts his stuff.”
What happened in the seventh was inexcusable. DeGrom gave up a one-out walk to Teixeira, then got Brian McCann to hit a double-play ball that looked like it would end the inning. Murphy fielded and threw to second base, which with the shift was being covered by David Wright, their two-time Gold Glove–winning third baseman. Wright, the kind of ballplayer who goes months without making a visible miscue, gave his throw to first an awkward flick, it sailed—and the runner was safe. Alfonso Soriano then made it 1–0 with a run-scoring double, and that was the final score.
The games with the Yankees were costly in another sense for the Mets: Soriano’s follow-through in the ninth inning of the Tuesday game hit Travis d’Arnaud in the head, and he ended up needing to go on the seven-day concussion disabled list. Once the initial concerns about the severity of the injury had been put to rest, there was some feeling that a break might be good for d’Arnaud, who had gone 0-for-5 in his final game to drop his average back under .200. As it turned out, d’Arnaud didn’t start again for two weeks, until May 29, going 0-for-4 against the Phillies in a game his roommate Zack Wheeler won to improve to 2-5. D’Arnaud picked up a couple of hits in the Mets’ fourteen-inning loss the next day to the Phillies, then mustered only one hit over his next four games, dropping his average to .184 by June 5, prompting Terry Collins to pinch-hit Bobby Abreu for him in that day’s loss to the Cubs at Wrigley Field. From Chicago the Mets flew out to San Francisco, and d’Arnaud endured an 0-for-3 to drop his average to .180, which was where it would stay frozen for weeks to come. Following the second game in San Francisco, which d’Arnaud had watched from the bench, the Mets announced that d’Arnaud, their best prospect among position players, was being demoted to Triple-A Las Vegas to work on his swing.
New York Daily News Mets beat reporter Kristie Ackert, there in San Francisco with the team, summed up the reaction.
“Travis d’Arnaud was shocked,” she wrote in her lead paragraph. “The Mets had been quietly mulling the idea of sending him down to Triple-A for about a week, but publicly denying it. The rookie catcher—and most of his teammates—were completely caught off guard Saturday night when he was called into the office and told to go down to Triple-A and fix his swing… . D’Arnaud was visibly upset after getting the news, as were some of his teammates. There was a steady stream of pitchers that made their way over to his locker to quietly talk to him, pat him on the shoulder and try to raise his spirits.”
Actually, the Mets had been mulling the move far longer than a week, but it did catch many off guard. They were not going to fall into the trap of waiting too long. Instead of flying with the Mets from San Francisco back to New York, d’Arnaud spent Saturday night in San Francisco, then the next morning flew to Denver and on to Colorado Springs, where he joined the Las Vegas 51s in time for the Monday opener of their four-game series there against the Sky Sox, the start of an eight-game road trip. It was a jarring transition, which was just the point. Going into the weekend, d’Arnaud was a big-leaguer flying into San Francisco, always a favorite stop for most big-leaguers with its great restaurants and rich range of nightlife options. Now he was 6,531 feet high in the Rocky Mountains at a place called Security Service Field, which sounded like the punch line to a joke (had he wound up in Guantánamo?). His last game had been played with a view of the sleek and sexy San Francisco skyline in the background; now he was playing across the street from a Walgreens and a gas station calling itself Kum & Go.
The remote setting may have had something to do with it, but when d’Arnaud arrived and sat down for a talk with 51s manager Wally Backman, hitting coach George Greer, and pitching coach Frank Viola, he was a receptive audience.
“The first day I got there, we had like a two-hour meeting just honestly talking about the basics of baseball, where my head was at, every little thing about this game,” d’Arnaud told me. “They actually got me to stop overthinking. They just said keep it simple: See the ball, hit the ball. You can only control hitting the ball. You can’t control if it’s hit at somebody. You can’t control if it’s hit in the gap. You c
an’t control any of that stuff.”
“Travis was in a situation where he was willing to listen,” Backman told me. “You could get into his head a little bit. To see him struggle the way he struggled early in the year, it was a major priority for us to try to do everything we could to help him. It was just: Be himself. Be who he is and who he was when he first went to the big leagues. Just relax and be the guy I know he can be. It was really to clear his head.”
They also told him to have fun. Talking about the conversation later, Backman, Greer, and Viola smiled in recollection, glad to have helped out, as if they were Androcles, the slave who famously removed a thorn from the paw of a lion and lived to tell the tale.
“He wasn’t having fun, and at twenty-five, if you’re not having fun playing baseball, why are you playing baseball?” Viola told me. “Travis had so much cluttered in his head. Here he is playing professional ball, he was a key component in the trade for a Cy Young Award winner. His expectations going into a big market are sky-high. It was just so much thrown at him in a short period of time.”
Viola, a Cy Young Award winner himself, paused to stare off into the distance and revel for a moment in his sense of empathy for the young man.
“The thing I loved about him is he came down here ready to work,” he continued. “From day one he didn’t care that he was Travis d’Arnaud, that he was a superstar in the making, whatever. He came down to work like everybody else, probably harder than everybody else.”
That Monday, d’Arnaud pinch-hit and—in his first at bat back in Triple-A—singled. The next day, he was 2-for-4 with a walk. On Wednesday, he was 3-for-5 with two home runs to pace the 51s to a 14–7 rout. Something had clearly changed. Through the end of that road trip to Colorado Springs and Oklahoma City, d’Arnaud remained hot, batting .394 with five homers and 10 RBIs in eight games, and headed back to Las Vegas with the 51s. He kept his new approach going and after fifteen games he had six home runs and sixteen RBIs and was batting .436. “Once the switch turned on, once he realized, ‘My god, I can play when I’m relaxed,’ it was a foreign experience for him,” Viola told me.