Baseball Maverick Page 34

  I mentioned that Billy Beane had often talked about how competitive Alderson was, and wondered if returning to Oakland for the first time since he became Mets GM kicked loose some added competitive fire in him. “Yeah, but you have to intentionally moderate that or not let on that it actually is that important,” he said.

  To keep the drive interesting, we talked about the kind of field manager Alderson holds in high regard. Dusty Baker, out of work that year after he parted ways with the Reds, had good plate discipline in his playing days, Alderson pointed out, but was less committed to that approach as a manager. Alderson had worked in Oakland with Billy Martin, Steve Boros, Jackie Moore, Jeff Newman, Tony La Russa, and Art Howe.

  “I was more deferential to field managers earlier in my career, less so now,” he said. “It’s a partnership with give-and-take. I’m not really interested in micromanaging anyone, including the manager.”

  For me as for Alderson, it was odd taking the off-ramp toward the entrance to the Coliseum parking lot. I’d spent more than four years showing up here the way people show up to the office, my place of work, my home away from home. I’d covered a lot of dreary baseball. I’d watched the Beane-Alderson relationship develop. I’d been there in the front row of the press box after Al Davis made a deal to bring the Raiders back to Oakland and somehow got the city to pay for a huge and hideously ugly addition to the stadium, Mount Davis, as C. W. Nevius of the Chronicle dubbed it. The Coliseum was a concrete bowl, never in the same league as a Wrigley Field or a Camden Yards, but for years it had its charms, given the beauty of the Oakland Hills in the background. Mount Davis, which I watched being built concrete slab by concrete slab, blotted all that out.

  “I imagine when you think about coming back here, when you think about the good times, you think mostly about the camaraderie and the people, like Steve Vucinich and Mickey Morabito,” I asked. “Is that right?”

  “Yeah,” Alderson replied. “And hills that you can’t see anymore.”

  Soon we had arrived in the office of Steve Vucinich, the team’s longtime equipment manager, just as I’d expected we would. Alderson associates this spot with everything he most likes about being in baseball. It was the same as in the military: He didn’t want to sit around with generals or admirals; he wanted to be out with the sergeants and lance corporals, too. “In the Marine Corps, if you were to talk to people who moved up even to become a general, they would say probably the most fun they had was at some other point in their career,” he said. “It’s nice to be a general, but what they really enjoyed was being a battalion commander. In the baseball world, being a GM is like being a battalion commander. Being a field manager is like being a company commander, the guy in the trenches. Being a president of a team is like being a colonel or a brigadier general. As you get further up, you’re not as involved in work you find the most fulfilling or the most challenging or the most fun.

  “I could have tried to be an owner. I could have tried to put a group together and buy a team, but I wasn’t interested in being an owner. This is what I enjoy, being a general manager. I enjoy being on the front lines, basically being in touch with everyone from scouts to clubhouse attendants. The nice thing about baseball is you can be a colonel or general for a while and then you can go be a major again.”

  I used to meet Vucinich and Morabito for dinner regularly during my first spring in Arizona as the Chronicle’s A’s beat writer in 1995. We’d head to Malee’s for Thai or get Italian at La Fontanella, but mostly we had steaks at a place called the Pink Pony, which meant coming early, saying hello to Downtown Kenny Brown behind the bar (who always poured me a Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks), and pulling up a stool to talk baseball with whoever might roll in. General managers used to flock there, and more than a few big trades were inked on cocktail napkins at one of the booths in the corner long after closing time. The Pony was the first stop Morabito made when he arrived from New York, coming out to join Billy Martin.

  “I remember when I first came out here from New York,” Morabito told me. “I had just left the Yankees in 1980, they picked me up at the airport and didn’t take me to the ballpark or the hotel, they took me to the Pony, where Billy Martin was having dinner with his coaches. Everyone in baseball you wanted to see was there that night.”

  On the wall behind Vuc’s office at the Coliseum hung the portrait of him that for years was on the wall at the Pony, before it closed down. There was also a blown-up image of a vintage “Catfish” Hunter baseball card and a picture of Vuc with Joe DiMaggio in an Oakland A’s uniform.

  Alderson, Vuc, and Morabito spent some time talking about minor-league baseball cities. The Mets’ choice to have their Triple-A affiliate in Las Vegas was often mocked, given the climate and distance, but there were no other attractive options. Alderson was on his way to Vegas next. “One thing about Vegas is you can get connections from there at all hours,” Morabito, a logistics whiz as a veteran traveling secretary, commented.

  Soon talk turned to Bud Selig, who as we spoke was upstairs having a press conference of some sort. One by one, new arrivals would pop in, and usually they’d make some sarcastic variation on the question “Did you go up to hear Bud?” which would then be met by a long stare. If you were the kind of person who hung out in Vuc’s office and absorbed the vibe and the conversation, you were also the kind of person who had a pretty good idea what Bud was going to say in a press conference before he got around to saying it.

  What was interesting, though, was the too-little, too-late challenges to Major League Baseball insider Rob Manfred’s bid to succeed Selig as commissioner. This was kicked around, wondered about, but it was Alderson who made the decisive point: In supporting opposition candidates, some owners had served notice that they wouldn’t have to find too many more votes for an ouster down the road.

  “They’ve gotten rid of a commissioner before, remember,” Alderson pointed out, referring to Fay Vincent, dumped by a faction that included Selig.

  Vucinich turned to me and smiled, enjoying having his old general manager back in his office again. The two had been through a lot together.

  “As I watch Sandy sitting there, and seeing all these media walk by and go, ‘It’s Sandy Alderson,’ it makes me think of Sandy’s going-away luncheon downtown somewhere,” Vucinich told me. “Bill King got up there and spoke, and my name was brought up a couple of times in speeches. You talk about Steve Vucinich’s office. You walk by and you never know who’s going to be sitting there. It could be a Hall of Famer, it could be a politician. A prime example, Sandy sitting here and all these people walking by.”

  His words echoed when I found out later the occasion was ­being marked in a contemporary way.

  “Mets GM, former #Athletics GM, Sandy Alderson is in chatting with Steve Vucinich,” came the tweet from Susan Slusser, my successor as A’s beat writer for the Chronicle, who also served as president of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

  “Like old times: Former #Athletics GM Sandy Alderson, now running Mets, chatting with old friends on the Oakland side,” added longtime Oakland Tribune columnist Carl Steward for his Twitter followers.

  At one point early in the game, A’s owner Lew Wolff, coming out of a visit with Selig, saw us in the next box and came in to say hello. He’s an amiable man and was making jokes about Selig.

  “I just got back from a fraternity reunion with Bud in Wisconsin,” he said. “It’s been sixty years. Bud hosted some of the events at his place. They asked me if I could host, and I told them I’ll host the next one.”

  Wolff earned a nice round of laughs. Alderson decided to do his best to set the A’s owner at ease and address the elephant in the room, Oakland’s two blockbuster trades and their current five-game losing streak.

  “You know when I was with the A’s and we traded Canseco to Texas in ’92 for Ruben Sierra, we’d won three in a row before the trade and then we lost I think it was five in a row,” he said. “We went into a tailspin, but then we came
out of it.”

  Wolff, standing behind me, flashed a look that I took to mean: Well, I hope it works out that way! It was a look of good-natured panic.

  “The purpose of the story was to uplift his spirits,” Alderson told me later. “Things can go haywire, but they usually turn around.”

  The game was scoreless into the fourth, when Travis d’Arnaud’s solo shot off left-hander Scott Kazmir gave the Mets a short-lived lead. The A’s answered in the bottom of the fourth with four runs, getting one on a sacrifice fly and three on Coco Crisp’s bases-clearing triple. The A’s losing streak was finally over, and the Mets’ own skid had quickly slid to three games.

  “I don’t have that much confidence in our ability to shut teams out these days,” a downcast Alderson commented as we drove across the Bay Bridge back to San Francisco after the game. “Offensively, we haven’t been scoring a lot of runs. Kazmir didn’t look that good tonight, but we haven’t been hitting anybody.”

  The next morning, I warmed up Terry Collins with some talk I knew we’d both feel passionately about: the unfair way our mutual friend Art Howe had been portrayed by the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in the movie version of Moneyball. “That is not him!” Collins exclaimed. “That is not him at all. He’s real smart, really smart.”

  How is it working with young players, and developing them, knowing that by the time the team has grown into a playoff team, you might not be managing them anymore? How do you balance the need to develop talent versus the need to win right away?

  “It’s that fine line you walk between development and winning, getting a young player and putting him in a bad spot, to where he’s going to fail, and yet, it’s best for his development,” he said. “That’s what you face here, because people in our city don’t want to talk about trying to build a team. They’re about doing it right now. So it can be tough… .

  “You’ve got to have some patience here. I’ve used that word a lot of times in New York, which they don’t like to hear, but you know what? It’s worked with Harvey. It’s worked with Zack Wheeler. It’s going to work with Syndergaard. And it’s going to work with a lot of these young guys. Look, they may not be where we want them to necessarily be today, but where are they going to be in two years? I remember when I was coaching Pittsburgh. In ’92 Barry Bonds was the MVP. Well, he came up in ’86. So it took a little time for the best player in baseball to be the best player in baseball. You’ve got to have some patience. Certainly I’ve learned that.”

  24

  THE FUTURE IS NOW

  There were times watching the 2014 Mets when it felt almost like taking a look at a time-lapse photograph sequence showing growth in progress. Wilmer Flores brought with him to the diamond a childlike quality that came across as confidence; talent had carried him along, through the way stations of baseball progress, without him ever having to stare down a sense of his own limitations, that most adult of self-awarenesses. Handed the job of regular starting shortstop for the Mets by early August, he looked like a poker-faced interloper, not jarringly out of place, but never claiming the role as his own. Then at the end of August he had a game where something clicked for him. It was his third three-hit game as a big-leaguer, but his first since that May, no small feat given its importance to a sputtering Mets offense. But Flores was always confident about hitting, so the breakout game at the plate was no real surprise. Far more surprising were the signs of defensive prowess he showed at short—once when he robbed Ben Revere of a base hit by diving up the middle to spear a hard-hit ground ball, then pulled his gangly frame up in time to heave across the diamond and nail Revere at first to end the eighth. In the ninth, with the Mets protecting a precarious lead, he turned a nifty double play, taking twenty-year-old Dilson Herrera’s spot-on throw from deep in the diamond and getting it back to first with a veteran middle infielder’s quickness. Who was this guy? This was not the Wilmer Flores who had so recently seemed such a quixotic choice to entrust with regular playing time at shortstop.

  Such stark glimpses of progress are actually quite rare in sports. In an age of tweets and tightly edited SportsCenter highlight reels, few take the time to watch with close attention how much we can glean from the first awkward forward steps of young talent. In fact it’s fascinating. In 2013 Josh Satin had earned playing time with the Mets by making the most of what he had, drawing more than his share of walks with plate discipline and coming through with singles and doubles; watching his progress that season, it was easy to fall into the fantasy that he could always make it look as effortless as he did that year. Satin was a likable, articulate young man, and who couldn’t relate to his quandary of having a great head for sports but just not being that athletic? Satin’s limitations were apparent. He had a lumbering, unsteady quality in running the bases, like a guy about to trip; his work on defense was steady but never impressive; and even at the plate, where he felt most comfortable, his swing was neither fluid nor compact, not for a moment poetic or awe-inspiring. There were no moments, watching Satin in 2013, when his forward progress had about it that time-lapse feeling of pronounced growth, of this player actually becoming something more before our eyes. Satin’s nosedive season in 2014 came as a shock, watching him snap downward from a .279 batting average (and .781 OPS) in 190 at bats in 2013 to an .086 batting average (and .399 OPS) in just thirty-five at bats, and you had to feel bad for the guy, especially since his thirtieth birthday was coming up in December and he might not get many more chances to stick at the big-league level.

  I called Satin up to discuss his disastrous year and he made no excuses. His tough year had nothing to do with opposing pitchers making adjustments. He just never found his swing. “It had nothing to do with anyone else,” he said. “It had to do with me. It was just a funky year.” Looking ahead, he said, “I know if I come in there ready to go, confident in my swing, and start swinging the bat like I have before, there will be plenty of opportunity.”

  Satin was an intriguing element in the mishmash of the 2013 season precisely because he was so much the exception. He’s about as classic a Moneyball player as you can find, both in his deep-seated commitment to plate discipline and in his obvious limitations; the idea with that Billy Beane system, adapted from Alderson, was that talented but flawed players were undervalued, so you could win by stockpiling them. “The reason he’s a Sandy Alderson–type player is because people like me are prepared to forgive the lack of athleticism and speed and versatility because of the approach,” Alderson said. “That’s the difference. Everybody appreciates the approach, but they don’t give it a presumption that, ‘OK, let’s figure out how to use him because of the approach,’ as opposed to, ‘Well, yeah, he’s got the approach, but he can’t run, he can’t do this, he can’t do that, therefore he can’t play.’”

  The discussion about market inefficiencies sometimes made innovation sound more complicated than it was; it could lead you in all sorts of directions. Beane, speaking at that Berkeley business school event, talked about how in a way a focus on the present had become undervalued in the market. “We’ve talked about, for us, identifying shifts in the marketplace,” he said. “There has been this trend to really value the future. In some cases, it may be overvalued.” Alderson and the Mets do not agree: What if general managers, in thinking about their own role, placed too much emphasis on the aspects of team-building most related to their obvious handiwork, like high-profile trades or free-agent signings, and ignored the quiet, difficult work of building up the machinery of an organization that could maximize every aspect of player development? This was the Alderson project in New York.

  The upward lift of young players is the only way to balance out the inevitable disappointments and setbacks, a point the Mets were reminded of repeatedly in the summer of 2014 watching their captain, Wright, looking like a shell of himself. The Mets were in Los Angeles playing the Dodgers on August 23, with deGrom starting his first game after coming off the DL. They were protecting a one-run lead when Wright came up wit
h one out and runners at the corners. He’d already hit into one double play in the game. All he needed to do was lift a ball for a sacrifice fly, but instead it was 5-4-3 again, another double play. Then in the seventh, with the Mets now trailing by a run, Daniel Murphy was walked intentionally so the Dodgers could face Wright. This would have been an almost unimaginable move any other year of Wright’s career. But Wright stepped up to the plate, his face a mask of unease, and promptly struck out, taking a called third strike and looking like a guy with no chance up there. His whole body language and demeanor made it painfully clear that, at least then and there, this was a ballplayer with no confidence.

  “Boy oh boy have times changed for David Wright,” Vin Scully said on the broadcast. “They walk the guy in front of him to get to him and then they blow him away.”

  It was a depressing reminder for the Mets of their unworkable financial situation. They were limited to a payroll of $85 million, a huge portion of which went to pay Wright his $20 million salary. On one level it made complete sense to pay Wright that money; fans demanded no less. But having so significant a percentage of their total salary expenditures invested in a single player did make it essential that he perform at full potential.

  Wilmer Flores was a legitimate talent, it was becoming clear, a natural hitter whose coltishness and loose-limbed awkwardness afoot belied an easy athleticism that enabled him to make steady progress as a big-league shortstop. It’s a subtle distinction, not one that can be converted into a logarithm, but the X factor differentiating those who improve and those who don’t often hinges on the ability to accept positive surprises, to have the feeling all along that they were going to crop up sooner or later. Even in some of his more unsightly earlier games at short for the Mets in ’14, Flores just about always had a sleepy-eyed, what-me-worry? expression, the look of a man used to having good things happen on the ball field, even good things as seemingly unlikely as making clear and tangible progress at handling baseball’s most demanding position.