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  When twenty-year-old Dilson Herrera was rewarded with a surprise call-up in late August, hopping to the Mets straight from Double-A and becoming the youngest player in the big leagues, the promise in the Mets’ lineup added up to a complete package: Up the middle, the key to any defense, the Mets now had rookie Travis D’Arnaud behind the plate, rookie Wilmer Flores at short, not-yet-a-rookie Herrera at second, and twenty-five-year-old second-year man Juan Lagares roaming center field with some of the flair of a young Willie Mays. “It’s incredible what he’s done in two or three years,” his A-ball teammate Josh Satin told me.

  There were no guarantees that the quartet of young players would all stick, or that they could develop into dangerous hitters. D’Arnaud finished the 2014 season with just a .242 average, but considering where he was when he got sent down to Las Vegas, he’d come a long way. His on-base percentage was .302 and his slugging percentage .416, making 2015 a key test of whether he can put a whole season together. If so, he could be an asset on both offense and defense. Lagares, too, showed impressive steps forward at the plate, batting .281 with an OPS of .703. It remained to be seen if he could build on that, or if opposing teams would find holes in his swing as they saw more of him. Flores was still a work in progress, and Herrera not even that just yet, but merely by having so many young players with obvious talent getting a chance to play in the big leagues, the Mets were developing that talent in the best possible way, toward the goal of having those players for themselves or, in some cases, putting together trades for star players. Going into the offseason, a trade for a proven shortstop with power remained a goal, if also a long shot.

  Early September brought a jarring reminder of how precarious any progress the Mets were making might be: David Wright was finally put on the shelf, the agony of his fumbling efforts to play through a shoulder injury at last over. Soon came word that the injury was far more severe than Wright or the team had let on—hardly a surprise. Wright’s numbers for the year told that story already: a .269 average, compared with .306 and .307 in 2012 and 2013, respectively; a career-low mark of eight home runs for the season, despite having gritted his teeth through 535 at bats; and an OPS of .698, also a career low. It was clear Wright could not simply have declined so much so suddenly; he had messed with his swing trying to play around the injury and paid the price. The question was: Was the damage permanent? By insisting on continuing to play, even though the Mets were in a rebuilding year, had he hurt the team both in the short run and in the long run?

  Powerhouse teams don’t generally fret about the outcomes of regular-season games. They’re confident in their ability to win seventy to eighty of their games without much fuss or bother, and know there will be ample opportunity to throw in another ten to twenty wins to win a division or, worst-cast scenario, squeak into the playoffs. The Mets by late 2014 were beginning to see what it would be like to be within a few steps of championship caliber, as opposed to many years away. But caroming through the last six weeks of the season, they were painfully aware of how given to wild swings of inconsistency and backtracking they continued to be, and how vulnerable they were to one bad inning and one bad game that could send them into a funk.

  The Mets had taken two of three from the Phillies to salvage a 12-17 mark for August—bad but one notch shy of disastrous, and at least they were not yet mathematically eliminated from the second National League wild-card slot. They went on the road to Miami and Cincinnati and took two of three in each series, giving them a chance to stay in the hunt with a strong showing against the Rockies at Citi Field. They swept all three games, and deGrom dominated Colorado in the middle game, pitching eight shutout innings and, incredibly enough, looking like he was actually getting stronger as the season advanced. If he’d been an intriguing Rookie of the Year candidate before that outing, he’d now vaulted past Billy Hamilton of the Reds to become the nominal front-runner.

  The Nationals came to Queens on September 11 and, long as the odds might have been, fans could at least show up at the ballpark that day knowing the team still had a shot at landing a playoff berth. It was the second week of September and for a change Mets fans could still dream. Then came the cold shower, the frigid blast of another pummeling at the hands of Jayson Werth and the loaded Nats lineup, putting the tantalizingly remote fantasies to rest.

  For many seasons in a row, the Mets in September had resembled an overinflated balloon suddenly subjected to a pinprick, flying around the room in a brief, dizzy flurry of inane misplaced energy and deflating visibly before our eyes, all the while emitting a sad, bleating whimper and finally, poof, disappearing from view. There was every reason to think the Mets would repeat the act in late 2014, once the Nationals had placed a jackboot to their necks. There was every reason to think that the feel-good narrative of Jacob deGrom and his dazzling run of dominance could not possibly continue. The converted shortstop took the mound at Citi Field against the Marlins on September 15, and Mets fans, forever ready to believe in turns for the worse, braced themselves.

  DeGrom, all gangly limbs and placid look of concentration, had the familiar puppy-doggish hop in his step as he bounced out to the mound to face the Marlins in the first and promptly set the side down in order, striking out Christian Yelich and Donovan Solano looking and then getting pesky Met-killer Casey McGehee to watch strike three, deftly framed by d’Arnaud. The Mets took the lead in the bottom of the first on a single by d’Arnaud, a walk to Duda, and a Flores two-run double, then deGrom came out for the second and dispatched Marcell Ozuna, Justin Bour, and Adeiny Hechavarria, striking out all three to run his streak to six straight Ks to open the game.

  The electricity in the air at Citi Field was crackling by the time former Met Jordany Valdespin came out to lead off the third for the Marlins. This was just the kind of oddball character, talented but ungoverned, to break up a run of perfect pitching, but no, he went down looking and deGrom’s streak now stood at seven. There was by now a mood of disbelief, a “Could this be real?” quality as deGrom struck out Jeff Mathis as well, which meant that all he had to do was strike out the opposing pitcher, Jarred Cosart, to set a major-league record for consecutive strikeouts to open a game. Wouldn’t you know it? Line-drive single, end of streak. The Mets went on to lose, but deGrom had pulled off the unlikely feat of once again making the Mets a “Did you see that?” talking point all around baseball. He’d become the first big-league pitcher to strike out the first eight batters of a game in nearly thirty years.

  “Opening the game with eight strikeouts was kind of an imprimatur, or stamp of approval, on his season,” Alderson told me.

  Great big-leaguers are built moment by moment. There is a chicken-or-egg aspect to becoming an established star: Yes, you have to show elite-level talent; yes, you have to come through in key games; yes, you have to turn promise into durability and a track record of consistency; but perception itself becomes part of the package. Alderson, who in his days in the commissioner’s office oversaw the league’s umpires, was still grumbling in 2014 about a clear-cut pattern of rookie pitchers being squeezed, but it is a rite of passage to handle those moments chin up, without complaining, and earn more respect—and more calls. One of the amazing aspects of deGrom’s 2014 run was the way he never looked bothered by anything, least of all calls that might have gone his way but didn’t, and by the final weeks of the season, he’d already built up a reputation to the point where he was going to get respect.

  As a former voter for Rookie of the Year, I can tell you that the process is all about numbers, yes, but also about special feats that make an impression and jump out. DeGrom’s eight straight strikeouts to open a game was just such a feat. It was now clear that deGrom had turned himself into a favorite for Rookie of the Year, an award that would be a wonderful attainment for deGrom himself, but even more so invaluable validation for the Mets and their grow-from-the-farm-system rebuilding effort.

  “I think it would be meaningful to the organization,” Alderson said in September. �
�It would be another indication of where we’ve come. I think it would be important. Back in Oakland, we got to the World Series three times, but what’s always mentioned in connection to that era are the three Rookies of the Year we had in a row in Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, and Walt Weiss.”

  Even though the Mets lost the deGrom eight-strikeout game, the jolt of energy it generated was unmistakable. They dropped two of three to the Marlins in that series, but after a day off to regroup, they swept the Braves in three, their first such sweep at Turner Field in seven years. In the final game of the series, the Mets eliminated the Braves from contention with a resounding 10–2 win, and it was deGrom on the hill, striking out ten in six innings and giving up just one earned run to drop his ERA for the season to 2.69. That would be deGrom’s last start of the season. The Mets were shutting him down out of concern for his total innings thrown, a common move around baseball now; Alderson explained that if they’d been tempted at all to give him one more start, to see if he could reach ten wins for the season, that temptation was put to rest when he started showing a clear decline in the velocity of his fastball over his last two starts, down from 97 and 96 to 94 and 93.

  Mets fans could be excited about having a potential Rookie of the Year, but three more games with the Nationals looked likely to bring the season limping to a close on a sour note. Sure enough, the Mets dropped two of three to Washington, and that funk carried over into the opener of their last series of the season, at home against the Astros. They lost that game 3–1, looking flat and distracted, and seemed ready to make a banana-peel slide out the last games of the season. Saturday’s game brought eight more innings of Mets futility, another punchless offensive performance with no runs and few hits, and then with one out in the ninth, Eric Young Jr. tripled and stayed at third when Daniel Murphy fisted a little looper to very shallow left. Then Lucas Duda came up: Boom! He turned on the second pitch and sent a screaming liner down the rightfield line for a walk-off home run, the first walk-off of his career, for a feel-good moment that felt like a party to anyone there or watching at home. Duda, a deeply modest man, had scarcely been seen to crack even a brief smile on the field, and now he was bounding around the base paths like a kid at recess, grinning ear to ear and looking completely relaxed at Citi Field for the first time, breaking up the huge scrum that greeted him by jumping on home plate to make it official and end the game.

  “It was nice to see him enjoy himself,” Alderson said that week. “Some people are guarded when they have some success. They don’t want to assume it’s going to happen again, or they don’t want to be embarrassed when it doesn’t happen again. I’m like that and Lucas is like that.”

  That gave Duda twenty-nine homers for the season, an amazing total for a man who went into spring training having no idea if he even would get the first-base job. He had been the salvation of the Mets’ offense, its brightest light, and it was only natural to hope for a little bit of magic going into the final game of the season. Could Duda make it two games in a row with a homer? Could he become the first Met since Ike Davis in 2012 to reach thirty home runs in a season?

  The Sunday game turned into almost a laugher. It was an entertaining game for the crowd of 34,897, the Mets twice taking one-run leads and losing them, but heading into the bottom of the eighth the Mets were up 4–3. Alderson, long since accustomed to walking around during games to help out his nerves, started pacing late in the game, impatient to have the W in the books, then took a walk in the concourse and ended up in his car in the executive parking lot.

  “I turned on Sirius XM to get the game, and since it was satellite radio, there was a four-or five-second delay,” Alderson told me. “I knew Duda was up, and Howie Rose and Josh Lewin were talking about how great it would be if Duda hit his thirtieth home run. They said he just missed a fastball and that the pitcher would try to get him to chase breaking balls. Because of the delay, I heard the roar of the crowd before I actually heard Howie describe the home run. I knew something good had happened, but didn’t know what.”

  Alderson, alone in his car, could smile and take in the excitement of the moment. He could also exhale: The season was ending, and the Mets had come through with a memorable and emotional exclamation point to the end of the year.

  “The last two days were great,” Alderson said that week. “We didn’t play all that well in Washington and were really flat Friday night against the Astros, which I think had a lot to do with the doubleheader in Washington and getting in late. We kind of slept-walked through a game on Saturday night until Duda hit that home run, which was like getting an electric shock. Then the next day, we swung the bats a little better, Bartolo Colon kept us in the game, and we broke through late. That was what made it so fun, that it all happened late. It’s always nice to leave a positive last impression. We had good crowds on both Saturday and Sunday and played well, so it was great. It felt scripted in a way. Everybody’s talking about the thirty home runs and boom, Duda hits it in his last at bat. We ended on a high note.”

  For Duda, those last two games were a chance to beam with pleasure right there in the public eye, in front of everyone. As Alderson well understood, he was a man who would rather not show anything than show too much self-confidence or too much pleasure in his own accomplishments. It was, after all, a team game, and it was a team game that would smack down anyone who thought too highly of himself. Duda, like Zack Wheeler, always had a strong sense of confidence, even of personal mission, but he kept it to himself, as he’d told me late that season.

  “A little bit of confidence goes a long way,” he said. “When you’re helping the team out, and having a little bit of a success, I think that definitely adds to your confidence level. I think that I was kind of a little bit misunderstood when people said I didn’t have confidence or I didn’t show it a lot. Just because you don’t show it doesn’t mean you don’t have it.”

  The end of the season brought a chance for Alderson to ask himself, like former New York mayor Ed Koch, “How’m I doin’?” It was one of the quirks of his job that, other than inarguable metrics of win-loss record and postseason success, if any, the job of baseball general manager was hard to monitor with any thoroughness, and few in the press really tried. For example, one paper hurriedly summing up Alderson’s tenure mentioned his signing of Chris Young and Curtis Granderson for 2014, calling one move a bust and the other a near bust, but did not even mention signing Bartolo Colon, who ended up winning fifteen games for the Mets and giving them 200 innings, clearly a positive acquisition.

  Beyond that, sometimes the most important deals were the ones you never made. There had been incessant clamoring for the Mets to sign shortstop Stephen Drew the previous offseason and it was a topic that buzzed around Alderson for months that winter like a cloud of gnats. The Mets just said no—and it was a good thing, too. Drew signed with the Red Sox during the season, later wound up with the Yankees, and posted truly dismal numbers. He batted all of .162 over 271 at bats with seven home runs and twenty-six RBIs. His OPS was a laughable .536.

  If the Mets had signed him to a two-year deal at more than $11 million a season, and he’d performed like that, Alderson would have been barbecued over it all season long. But far worse, Drew would have been an anchor pulling the Mets down; it could have been Jason Bay all over again, except worse in a way because a shortstop was front and center every day—and Drew’s contract would have included provisions requiring him to play a certain number of games, no matter how awful he was. Alderson and his front office dodged a bullet, but it wasn’t something anyone even mentioned at the end of the year.

  Probably no single development validated the Mets’ commitment to their farm system as much as deGrom’s remarkable Rookie of the Year season, which no one saw coming. “You become attached to him after a while,” Frank Viola told me. “It’s not that instantaneous ‘Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god’ that you have with Matt and Zack and Noah, but it does get to you after a while and you say, ‘Jake’s right the
re with them.’ You can’t teach keeping the ball down that consistently. He picked up the slider. He picked up the changeup. And he’s able to use them behind in the count in such a short period of time. People forget, he’s only pitched for four years. He’s picked things up so quick, so I think now, after what you’re seeing after fifteen or eighteen starts in the big leagues, you can say yeah, he’s got the stuff, maybe not the pure, natural, God-given stuff as Matt and Zack, but he can compete with them.”

  What was clear, assessing the ledger over Alderson’s years in Queens, was that he’d pulled enough rabbits out of the hat to put the team in position to successfully mesh its homegrown talent with well-chosen free-agent acquisitions. The Mets were now seen as a team that developed talent well. They had a ways to go before they reached the level of the San Francisco Giants back around the time Alderson traded Carlos Beltrán for Zack Wheeler, back when the Giants’ system had produced a string of Cy Young candidates and a pitching prospect in their organization might as well have had a top-quality beef stamp on his ass. But Harvey’s ’13 season and deGrom’s Rookie of the Year award in ’14 and Wheeler’s progress at the big-league level all added up to an upgrade in the Mets’ brand, and that meant they were now at the point where they could afford to make trades not just to plug holes but to try to upgrade in an important way. Going into the 2015 season, Harvey was untouchable and deGrom was untouchable, but Zack Wheeler was not—almost, but not quite. In late September 2014, Alderson told me: “With Harvey coming back, somebody has to go. It won’t be deGrom and it probably won’t be Wheeler, unless somebody went crazy and offered us something we couldn’t turn down.”

  The imprimatur of deGrom’s Rookie of the Year award was like a flash of light shining the way forward to the Mets’ immediate future, which even the crustiest cynic mumbling to himself on the 7 train had to admit looked as optimistic as it had in many years, but it was also a jolt to pull the Mets to the present and away from the dreariness of the recent past. The same was true of Juan Lagares and his thrilling development into one of the best young center fielders in the game. Considering he’d been converted from shortstop so recently, and therefore can be expected to continue to improve in center so long as injuries don’t derail his progress, it was remarkable that he snagged the 2014 Gold Glove Award, becoming only the third Mets outfielder to be so honored. Lagares batted a respectable .281 with an on-base percentage of .321 and slugging percentage of .382; he finished with thirteen stolen bases, after a flurry of action on the base paths late in the season, and could even turn into a reliable leadoff hitter. In looking to rebrand the team as fresh and exciting and likable, Lagares was a huge asset, truly a pleasure to watch at work in the outfield and also clearly a young man who was down-to-earth and likable.