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  In talking about run differential, Alderson was harking back to that nugget of wisdom Eric Walker had considered so important he put it on the first page of the report he’d written for the Oakland A’s at Alderson’s request: “It is elementary that the more runs a team scores and the fewer runs it gives up, the more games it will win.” This insight was developed by Bill James into a famous formulation, as Baseball-Reference.com puts it: “The Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball is a creation of Bill James which relates the number of runs a team has scored and surrendered to its actual winning percentage, based on the idea that runs scored compared to runs allowed is a better indicator of a team’s (future) performance than a team’s actual winning percentage. This results in a formula which is referred to as Pythagorean Winning Percentage.”

  Alderson was mocked in some quarters when he told Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com that same day: “If you look at the run differential, we should be a .500 team.” The word “should” was ridiculed, as if Alderson was trying to get a free pass on the team’s win-loss record based on confusing statistics. I myself had mocked Pythagorean win-loss records. It’s important to understand what they are and what they are not. They are a tool, nothing more; if a team’s win total lags behind the number indicated by Pythagorean number crunching, it’s a good time to start looking hard for reasons why. Or sometimes it might tell you that the law of averages will kick in. That was what happened with the Mets that month. They went on an 8-2 run to close out the first half, going into the All-Star break at five games under .500.

  It’s a given that for every step or two forward a promising young pitcher makes, he’s liable to have a step back here or there. Time and again early on Jacob deGrom had been frustrated when he pitched deep into a game but lost because the team’s offense was sputtering. He took a loss in his big-league debut, despite holding the Yankees to one run over seven, since the Mets were shut out in that game; after four games, he was 1-3, despite giving up a total of seven runs over twenty-six innings of work. Through it all deGrom showed an uncanny ability to let this frustration evaporate without a trace. Even behind the scenes, away from the roving eyes of reporters, there were no signs of deGrom being anything but quietly determined and intent to keep his run of strong outings going. It seemed almost to make him impervious to distraction, the trial by fire of having his early win-loss record so unjust a reflection of his performance, sagging all the way to 1-5 after a loss to the Braves on July 2 at Turner Field. But then he went on a roll, winning five straight starts, including a dazzling run of four straight starts giving up one run or less. By the end of July his ERA stood at an almost ludicrous 2.79.

  That month brought another feel-good story line for the Mets: Unlike in the three previous seasons, this year the Mets had used their first-round draft pick to choose a player who had the potential to make an impact in the big leagues sooner rather than later. Michael Conforto of Oregon State, a left-handed-hitting outfielder with both power and plate discipline, was twice the Pacific-12 Player of the Year. He batted .345 with seven home runs in fifty-nine games—and set a record with fifty-five walks.

  “Conforto’s hitting style definitely fits us,” Alderson said. “If you talk to Scott, he’ll tell you that Michael picked the Mets. We didn’t draft him, he picked us.”

  22

  HANGING BY A THREAD

  Terry Collins, cagey baseball lifer that he was, well understood that by mid-August his job prospects were slipping fast. Oh, in all but the most garish scenarios he was likely to limp through to the end of the season before hanging up his Mets uniform, but that would be agony. His time as Astros manager had ended badly, with the players growing tired of his overbearing style. As Joe Morgan wrote in his book Long Balls, No Strikes, “He was so uptight, his players thought each pitch was life-or-death.” Failure, that great teacher in baseball as in life, instilled deep in Collins the importance of never losing a clubhouse, of always engaging with his top players, and he’d worked very hard to have good communication with his team and to stay positive. He wanted to be skipper of the team this group was capable of becoming. He’d kept his game face on through the long slog of rebuilding, driving a jalopy, and now he wanted a chance to go for a spin behind the wheel of the high-performance sports car the 2015 Mets looked poised to become.

  First he’d have to get through August. The Mets dropped three of four at home against the Giants to open the month and then traveled to Washington for three with the Nationals. They won the series opener, riding resurgent Zack Wheeler to an easy 6–1 victory, but then were drubbed twice, the painful loss coming that Thursday when they lost 5–3 to end Jacob deGrom’s run of victories in five straight starts. Ian Desmond homered off deGrom in the second, ending his streak of 671/3 innings without giving up a home run, the longest ever by a Mets rookie. DeGrom took the loss, but far worse, after the game he told the team he had some discomfort in his pitching shoulder. He was flown back to New York for an MRI four days later.

  DeGrom was sent to the Hospital for Special Surgery on East Seventieth Street in Manhattan for the MRI, walking distance from Alderson’s New York apartment, so the GM headed over to pay him a visit. Alderson found deGrom and Mets pitcher Jeremy Hefner both in the hospital, two young men going through wildly different career trajectories. DeGrom’s MRI results were generally positive, indicating rotator-cuff tendinitis, not a major concern, but enough of one to earn deGrom a little rest and a stint on the fifteen-day disabled list.

  “Jacob should be fine,” Alderson explained at the time. “It’s usually from fatigue. He’s a pretty slender kid. It’s a function of his workload as well as his exercise program. We don’t think his program was deficient, but this is the first time he’s gotten to the innings level he has, so it’s not unreasonable to expect that something like this would happen. It’s just fortunate he was sensitive to what was going on and honest with us and we got it looked at right way.”

  Hefner, 4-8 for the Mets in 2013 with a 4.34 ERA, had lost a year with Tommy John ligament-replacement surgery in his pitching elbow. He’d been working his way back when he started feeling elbow pain again. “They were in adjoining rooms at the hospital, and Jeremy got the news he’d reinjured his elbow,” Alderson told me. “He handled it well. It’s how he handles all things, stoically.”

  Hefner may or may not have had much chance of cracking the Mets’ rotation, given the talent the team was stockpiling there, and the immediate impact of the grim news on his elbow was to offer a loud, unmistakable cautionary note—to the Mets and to ace pitcher Matt Harvey, dealing with the frustrations of his own comeback from Tommy John surgery. Harvey missed the attention badly and seemed forever on the verge of doing something crazy to be in the spotlight; he actually got confused and did a live interview on ESPN during a Mets game, saying later he’d thought it was a day game, the kind of thing that ticks off teammates. The Hefner news was a sobering reminder to Harvey and his agent, Scott Boras, of all he had to lose by pushing the pace of his rehabbing, and for Alderson, urging more restraint was easy enough.

  “I’ve had a couple of conversations with Matt since Hefner’s injury recurrence,” Alderson said then. “We’re on the same page, but we’ve also got to tone him down a little bit to make sure he’s not overdoing the rehab.”

  Alderson may not have been worried about deGrom’s shoulder, but given the infusion of energy the young pitcher had been giving the Mets every start, losing him was no small hit. Then again, one of the weird up-is-down-and-down-is-up aspects of being in rebuilding mode is that setbacks also equal opportunity: It was because of an injury that deGrom wound up in the Mets’ rotation at all, instead of getting a few innings in the pen.

  With deGrom on the disabled list with that shoulder tendinitis, an opportunity was now staring the Mets in the face to make headlines and give the fans a jolt of excitement: They could bring up hard-throwing Noah Syndergaard from Vegas and give him a spot-start in place of deGrom. It wasn’t just press hype. Syndergaard, o
ne of the three players the Mets landed in the trade that sent R. A. Dickey to Toronto, was another tall, lanky righthander with a classic power pitcher’s build, and then some, at six-foot-six. He’d repeatedly hit 100 miles per hour with his fastball, a fact right there that boggled the mind. He didn’t have to land at the big-league level with the kind of splash Matt Harvey did, because after all it was hard for an organization to find one player in a decade to debut the way Harvey had in 2013, but if Syndergaard could plug himself somewhere into the constellation of Wheeler, Harvey, and deGrom, all of them by this point having established themselves as big-leaguers to watch, the Mets would really have something.

  Wheeler, Harvey, and deGrom had all hit 97 on the radar gun, with Wheeler maxing out at 98 and Harvey at 100. Add Syndergaard and his 100 to that, see enough from him in late 2014 to know he’d arrived, and the Mets could titillate fans with the strong likelihood of going into the 2015 season with four dominating young flamethrowers, all in the 97 range and up with their fastballs. Sure there would still be doubts. Could Harvey come back from Tommy John? Would these young pitchers all continue to progress without setbacks? But doubts are the vermouth in the martini of excitement: With Syndergaard in the mix, the Mets’ rotation would become a great story line, one Jay Horwitz tweet or back-page New York Post cover headline away from having a nickname. The excitement would be palpable.

  “The three pitchers in this organization that you just go ‘wow’ are Matt, Zack, and Noah,” Frank Viola told me that week, and as a former Cy Young winner his words carried added weight. “Those three you just go ‘wow’ because of just their pure, God-given natural stuff. Jake had to work for it a little bit. He’s one of those guys you have to watch five to ten starts to realize, ‘Wow, we can talk about this guy in the same breath as the other three guys.’”

  As we spoke, on the outfield grass of Sacramento’s Raley Field before the 51s’ game with the River Cats, Viola said he thought Syndergaard was ready, but did sound some cautionary notes. It had been an up-and-down season for Syndergaard, nothing that led Alderson and his brain trust to detract from their estimation of the young pitcher’s potential, but enough to give them pause about rushing him along. In his most recent start, back in Vegas, Syndergaard had shut out visiting El Paso in six innings of work and struck out seven. It was a step forward in a season that had included a fair share of setbacks for the young phenom.

  “This year has just been a very humbling experience for me,” Syndergaard told me on August 5. “It’s like my first time I’ve really struggled in my career. I’ve had a few bad starts along the way, but this was kind of an eye-opener. It’s a stepping-stone. Now it’s teaching me how to pitch, rather than throw.”

  He was 8-5 over his twenty starts at that point with a 4.85 ERA, but over his last three starts he’d struck out twenty in 172/3 innings and posted a 0.52 ERA.

  “Really the last couple times I’ve been out there and thrown, I’ve had a lot more confidence and I’ve become a more well-rounded pitcher,” he told me. “I’ve been able to throw my fastball to both sides of the plate, which I haven’t been able to do consistently.” He was also learning to work in his breaking pitches even in hitter’s counts, just to mix it up. “I became too fastball happy, and it doesn’t matter how hard you’re throwing if it’s a fastball count and the hitter basically knows what’s coming. You’re not keeping them off-balance. You’re not keeping them on their toes. When the hitter’s comfortable in the box, there’s a good chance that they’re going to win the battle.”

  It might have been the circumstances of our talk, alone in a dark patch of parking lot just outside the visiting-team changing room in Sacramento, but Syndergaard struck me as having an unusually thoughtful and earnest approach. He was speaking slowly, thinking his words through with care and then saying them with conviction.

  “Do you know who Harvey Dorfman was?” he asked me at one point.

  I did a double take, half expecting to turn and see some old sportswriter friend of mine smirking in the near distance, having put Syndergaard up to this. But no, it was just the two of us out there.

  “Sure,” I said, not wanting to break the flow of conversation by noting that it was Sandy Alderson who first hired Dorfman to work in big-league baseball.

  “I have The Mental ABC’s of Pitching by him, and before every start, I just make it routine, I read a few chapters out of that book and get my head right,” he told me in a quiet voice, not at all shy, but maybe not used to sharing so personal a detail with a reporter either. “I get focused. That’s been a big thing for me, is being able to focus for seven, eight innings at a time. That’s what helps when it comes to executing pitches, is extreme focus. That’s something I think Matt Harvey exemplifies really well, his bulldog mentality out there. He just goes out there with that confidence and that focus and he gets the job done.”

  “The thing I love about him is he’s like a magnet,” Viola said about Syndergaard. “You say something to him and he takes it all in.”

  “Noah’s a pretty thoughtful guy,” Paul DePodesta told me. ­“Going into his senior year in high school, he was not hyped as the next best thing coming out of Texas. It wasn’t until later in his senior year that his status came up. The Blue Jays surprised people with where they took him in the draft, thirty-eighth overall as a supplemental pick. I think he’s more grounded than your typical top, top prospect. This is a guy who has become a great prospect. I don’t think he’s as caught up in it as some other guys.”

  On August 7 in his next start, Syndergaard gave up only two earned runs against visiting Albuquerque, but he picked up the loss to run his record to 8-6 and walked as many (four) as he struck out. His ERA stood at 4.79. For Alderson and the Mets, trying to decide whether to bring him up, it was actually an easy call: They had no room on the twenty-five-man roster and would have had to clear a spot for him. Plus, they didn’t want to bring Syndergaard up just to get a quick look. They wanted him to come up, taste some success, build on it, and continue to develop at the big-league level.

  “There’s no question once he gets the call up in New York, you’re not going to see him again in the minor leagues,” Viola told me. “His stuff is that good. Once you start throwing different pitches in fastball counts and you become successful, it makes pitching totally a different game, and I think that’s what he’s close to right now. His last five starts, all those five starts, he’s pitched really well. So I think he’s starting to get it. We’re talking about a twenty-one-year-old kid here and sometimes we’re talking to him like he’s a ten-year veteran. It’s all a learning process and it’s really fun to watch and be a part of.”

  Rafael Montero was called up instead to make the spot-start in deGrom’s place against the Nationals on August 12, and the Mets suddenly looked like a team that was reeling. That night at Citi Field Montero coughed up a 7–1 loss marked by a five-run fifth. What the Nationals did to the Mets in that three-game series went well beyond mere embarrassment. This was more like humiliating. Bartolo Colon pitched well the next night and the Mets had chances to win—and in fact should have won, given the way the Nationals made mistakes—but fell short. The Nats had outscored the Mets 70–20 over their last ten games at Citi Field, winning all ten of those games, and the mismatch was so noticeable, it looked like the field was physically tilting toward the visitors’ dugout.

  Terry Collins, startled to see his players unlearning much of the progress they’d made over the season, woke up the next day to a New York Post headline proclaiming COLLINS EXPECTED TO RETURN TO METS BARRING COLLAPSE. The reassuring headline that Thursday morning, echoing a Jon Heyman report the day before, struck an odd note indeed since just the night before Alderson had gone off on his manager after the home loss. “I ranted a little,” Alderson told me later. “It was not my best hour.”

  The Post article quoted “one official” saying, “Why wouldn’t he be back?” That one official was not Alderson, who was still steaming mad the following
day when he flew to Kingsport, Tennessee, to scout some of the Mets’ Rookie League prospects playing there, in particular six-foot-four outfielder Wuilmer Becerra, acquired in the R. A. Dickey trade with Toronto, who at age nineteen was on his way to a fine season, batting .300 with ten doubles and seven home runs.

  Soon after he landed in Tennessee, Alderson pulled his rental car over to the side of the road to vent over the phone about his frustration with where the team was going.

  “Last night I told Terry that people are accountable,” Alderson told me. “Something needs to change.” Collins’ chances of coming back for another year stood at that point at maybe 51 percent, and Alderson added, “Frankly for me, that percentage has been eroding.”

  Collins was far from surprised at Alderson’s outburst the night before.

  “We have a philosophy here,” he told me later that week. “And when we get out of our offensive approach, it drives him crazy. I understand it, because we have both told our players—and we have lived it—that when they stick with it, it works.”

  Up until July, the Mets were among the league leaders in walks. With their meager batting average, taking bases on balls was the only way they were going to consistently generate offense. Suddenly in August even disciplined hitters like Lucas Duda were taking bad swings and bases on balls were scarce. The Mets made it through the first two games of the disastrous Nationals series without walking one time. Teams with loaded offenses can survive that kind of drought, not iffy lineups like what the Mets were putting out in 2014. A first-pitch fastball where you wanted it could be a pitch to hit. A first-pitch slider low and off the plate, which you could not possibly drive, was not. The difference between the one and the other was not subtle; it was not hard to understand and it did not shift or alter over time. Yet for some reason a collective breakdown in mental sharpness had ripped through the entire Mets lineup.

  Wilmer Flores had come up in the seventh inning of the previous night’s game against the Nationals with a chance to tie up the game. This was one of those weird occasions where the visiting Nats, good as they were under manager Matt Williams, seemed to go out of their way to hand the game to the hometown team. Washington first baseman Adam LaRoche misplayed a ground ball into a single, one of three errors by the Nationals, and when Juan Lagares came up next, he was hit by a pitch, loading the bases with one out, to bring up Flores. He’s a bright young man who responds well to coaching, and he was fully aware that if he could hit the ball to the outfield, either on the ground or in the air, he’d bring the runner home from third and the Mets would be in business. The first pitch was down and in, not a good pitch to try to hit for a sacrifice fly, not a pitch a hitter wanted anything to do with in that situation. Still Flores swung, grounding out to third. Then Kirk Nieuwenhuis struck out and the rally fizzled.