Baseball Maverick Page 36

  “I was with a friend watching ESPN when I found out I won,” Lagares told me. “Within five minutes everybody in my family called me: my mom, my father, my three brothers, we are all very close.” The joy he takes in playing baseball, readily apparent to anyone tuning in a Mets game, came through even in conversation. “I know I can run a little bit. I enjoy it. I like to have fun and play hard, like I always do. That’s what I want to keep doing, so that I can be the best one day.”

  Mets fans were not the only ones who were going to keep an eye out for Lagares in 2015 to see how he continued to improve. It was an exciting prospect, following the development of up-and-comers like Lagares and deGrom, and the Rookie of the Year and Gold Glove honors offered a reminder that others saw potential in the Mets’ talent as well. Alderson had long understood that the only way to move payroll up and to continue to make upgrades was first to put an exciting, dynamic, winning team on the field that brought out more fans. Finally going into 2015 it was rational and unforced to anticipate a surge in fan enthusiasm.

  EPILOGUE

  ZERO HOUR FOR THE METS

  The countdown to the Mets’ 2015 season in a sense began on September 11, 2014. That was the day Matt Harvey went on WFAN radio and, with a few words, cranked the temperature up to the boiling point, anticipating the team’s 2015 Opening Day matchup with the Nationals in Washington. “I’m looking ahead to April 6 and counting Washington Nationals as a W,” Harvey told cohosts Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton. That, sports fans, is an out-and-out guarantee, one that was sure to get the attention of the Nationals, especially considering that on the day Harvey spoke, Washington was winning its twelfth straight against the Mets at Citi Field, a truly embarrassing distinction for the hometown squad. Harvey does not do embarrassment. He does not do halfway. No one dismisses the possibility that Harvey’s elbow will go out on him again, possibly even in the time since this book was put to bed before the start of the 2015 season, but all indications going into the offseason were of a pitcher primed to pick up where he left off with his phenomenal 2013 season.

  The Harvey era starts now. If he fails to regain his 2013 form, the disappointment of that loss would reverberate loudly for the franchise and threaten to undermine any return to championship caliber, no matter how compelling a collection of other talent the team has assembled. A resurgent Harvey, once again putting on displays like he put on at the 2013 All-Star Game, would not only anchor the top of the Mets’ rotation, helping it achieve a critical mass of dominance, but his personality and attitude would also transform the team and its portrayal in the media. The sturdy appeal of David Wright has faded as he’s struggled more and dealt with injuries; Harvey offers up something fresh, a cocktail of youth and talent and swagger and insouciance, a little bit dumb, sure, in that way of headstrong youth, but canny and self-aware, funny and hip. He may not be the next Joe Namath, but if he comes through in the glare of October baseball, he could have a run as one of the biggest sports stars in New York.

  Harvey still has to decide who he wants to be. He can be a great competitor and a great Met even if he forever divides himself between his twin loves, baseball dominance and, well, to put it bluntly, himself. A healthy dollop of self-love, plain old-fashioned narcissism, is a good and probably necessary quality in a great, big-game pitcher. To flash back on Harvey’s most widely witnessed star turn, a distant memory as we head into the 2015 season, he was hyped heavily as the National League starter in the 2013 All-Star Game at Citi Field and got into trouble but put on a show. It was an iconic sequence. When people ask this spring and early in the season, “Is he back?” or “Is he Matt Harvey again?” they’ll mean: Is he that guy? Does he have that wicked arsenal at his command, and the ice-in-his-veins absolute mental control to make the most of it? Then the next question that smart opposing hitters will ask will be: Is he still hanging out with supermodels at Manhattan clubs in the wee hours of the night?

  With Harvey back it’s easy to imagine the Mets over the coming seasons making an easy pivot, pulled along by events rather than pushed along by a nervous marketing or PR campaign, toward the kind of open confidence that translates into not having to worry what anyone says about you. The time has come for Alderson to put himself on the line in public more often. He was no doubt smart to come across in his first years with the Mets as half invisible. He vowed coming into New York that he was going to tone it down—and did. That strategy has run its course, though. If the Mets are ­going to be a playoff team not in some distant, dreamy future, but in 2015, they need Alderson to be a public face of the team the way he was for the A’s back in his Oakland years. So far, Alderson in New York has been the embodiment of patience, because that was what the organization needed to give itself time for fundamental and lasting change. He also needed to regroup after a stunning series of setbacks—for himself and the organization—soon after he took the job as Mets GM, starting with the tragic death of his father and continuing on through a series of disclosures about the Mets’ finances.

  The team is now poised to show more “payroll flexibility,” as Jeff Wilpon put it at the September 2014 press conference announcing Alderson’s contract extension. He’s now made his mark on the team. He’s shifted the culture. He’s painstakingly built up the farm system and instituted a process that brings talent along. Given the pieces he now has to put down on the board, Alderson has enough to work with—and it’s all on him, ultimately. He’s made some good moves as Mets GM and also had his share of misses. The question is how it all relates to where the Mets find themselves in 2015 and beyond. The Chris Young signing, an absolute bust, but a one-year absolute bust, was a mosquito bite on the ass compared with the potentially franchise-shifting importance of two transactions: trading Carlos Beltrán to the Giants for Zack Wheeler and trading R. A. Dickey, Josh Thole, and Mike Nickeas to the Blue Jays for Travis d’Arnaud, Noah Syndergaard, and Wuilmer Becerra. Those two transactions tipped the balance, adding to an impressive haul of talent brought into the system on Minaya’s watch.

  The biggest single shift for the Mets going forward will be how they view the first month of the 2015 season. Gone are the days when they used the first weeks of the season to sift through large piles of potentially viable players and pitchers, hoping to find a few who could stick. The 2015 Mets not only will take the field on Opening Day with a certain amount of strut, at least compared with teams of the recent past, but they will also take the field with a good idea of who their everyday players will be. The 2013 Mets were .500 over their last 100 games; if you subtracted the first sixty-two games of the year, when they were sifting through players and went 24-38, they’d have been a decent team. In 2014 the Mets were a dreary eleven games under .500 going into their Fourth of July home game against the Rangers, then went 42-35 the rest of the way. For 2015, with Harvey and late-inning reliever Bobby Parnell due back from injuries, and a nucleus of young talent now fully developed to move forward, the team can slice away the early garbage-time portion of the year they have had to endure during their rebuilding phase.

  “If you look at our rotation going into the 2015 season, we have nine guys we could legitimately use as starters,” Alderson told me after the end of the 2014 season. “The five we have now, plus Harvey, Montero, Steven Matz, and probably Cory Mazzoni, another guy we like. That’s nine that we have right now. We don’t have to go sign the Shaun Marcums of the world. In fact, we can probably move one or maybe two of what we have. We have the quality and the depth.”

  For his first seasons as Mets GM, no subject tormented Alderson like the bullpen, underfunded and undertalented, manned by a motley collection of veterans, some sublime, like the ageless LaTroy Hawkins, so good for the Mets in 2013, but far too many others forgettable. The Mets experimented in 2014 with working young talent into the pen and it turned out far better than they could ever have imagined. Flamboyant Jenrry Mejia finally accepted that his rightful home was in late-inning relief and warmed to the closer role, taking his antic celebrati
ons to new heights with twenty-eight saves. Jeurys Familia, imposing at six-foot-three and 240 pounds, had probably an even better year than his fellow Dominican ­Mejia. Familia finished with a 2.21 ERA over 771/3 innings, and just might have a better shot at being the closer of the future than Mejia does. Because of their depth at pitching, the Mets can fill their slots from within the system and not have to go shopping for risky bargains.

  “If you look at the bullpen, we don’t have to go outside the organization,” Alderson said. “We have the depth, quality, and roster flexibility. We’ve got enough guys in our system.”

  The goal was to build talent in the organization and build up a winning culture, and by at least one measure, they were doing just that: Baseball America pointed out in September 2014 that the Mets had recorded the highest organizational winning percentage in baseball. All seven Mets affiliates, unlike the Mets themselves, finished .500 or better. The Astros had finished first overall in this category in both 2012 and 2013. “Moving from eleventh place to fourth place and now to first place in the span of three years, the Mets have overtaken the Astros,” the magazine noted.

  It’s now up to Alderson. He agrees with his toughest critics in New York that the time has now come for the team to show something for his four years at the helm. It’s time to win. That doesn’t just mean eking out an impressive total during the regular season, it means qualifying for the playoffs and then advancing. Alderson needs to do a better job, moving forward, of making sure the Mets’ offensive philosophy is translating down through the ranks to every coach and every player. That was hard to do during the years of weeding out, but now he can and must insist on going with a lineup heavy with patient hitters. Lucas Duda’s thirtieth home run, a storybook end to the 2014 season, was important above all as a message: Do what Duda does, take walks if they come, so you can get more pitches to crush into the stands. There can be no more breakdowns to the point where players get as far from basic plate discipline as they did during that telling stretch in July 2014.

  A good example of the way Alderson liked things to work came in the hiring of Kevin Long as hitting coach going into 2015. Long, the former Yankees hitting coach, was an obvious strong candidate for the job, given his success and his commitment to the kind of plate discipline that was so central to the Mets’ approach under Alderson, but especially because Long himself was a dynamic individual, someone who could be counted on to stay active in reminding hitters of what they needed to do. Alderson was in Hawaii on a short vacation with Linda and had a good talk with Long on the phone. He then talked to Curtis Granderson, who in his years with the Yankees loved working with Long and had often talked him up to other players. Alderson asked Granderson to call Long. Given all the other teams interested in hiring Long, the Mets knew they needed to move fast if they were going to land him—and if they had an inside track because of the closeness between Granderson and Long, so much the better. Granderson talked to Long, all right, and they were both excited about all that Long could do with the Mets. In fact, Granderson was so energized by the talk, he then called David Wright to tell him about where it stood with Long. That led to Wright calling Long as well to do his own version of encouraging him to take the job. To hire Long, the Mets had to dig deeper into their budget than they’d intended, but it was worth it for several reasons: The hire showed players how serious the organization was about encouraging hitters to follow an offensive philosophy in line with that espoused by Alderson, and the Granderson-Long relationship would help Long quickly develop a rapport with Wright and other Mets hitters. “Kevin has the kind of personality and experience that will allow him, within the general framework we have established in the organization, to make the hitting approach his, not mine,” Alderson says.

  A week after the Mets hired Long in late October 2014, their plans for the offseason hit a snag. They’d set their sights on Rockies outfielder Michael Cuddyer, already thirty-five years old by then, but an appealing addition in many ways. He’d been an All-Star in 2013 when he batted .331, winning the National League batting title that year, helped by hitter-friendly Coors Field, finishing with twenty home runs and an OPS of .919. Injuries had limited him to 205 at bats in 2014, but he still hit a scorching .332.

  “We had our eye on him,” Alderson told me, “a righthanded hitter with power, excellent hitter, great in the clubhouse, somebody we thought might want to come back to the East Coast, from the Norfolk, Virginia, area, friend of David Wright’s, older so probably not looking for a long-term contract, somebody that would be a reasonable cost but could have a big impact, looking at a bounce-back year not because of performance but because of injury, so he made a lot of sense. We didn’t think he’d get a qualifying offer from the Rockies, so we were all teed up to go after him.”

  Colorado in fact did make a qualifying offer of $15.3 million to Cuddyer, meaning that if the Mets signed him they would have to give up their first-round draft pick. In recent years they’d hesitated before making such a move, and many in the press assumed they were out of the running. Newsday reporter Marc Carig wrote that the Rockies’ “surprise move” of making Cuddyer a qualifying offer had “essentially priced out the Mets,” adding, “A source said the Mets have little interest in giving up their fifteenth overall selection in next year’s draft.”

  No question the Mets were caught flat-footed by Colorado’s move. “That caused us to hesitate briefly,” Alderson acknowledged. But they decided to go for it anyway: They analyzed the options and concluded they were better off signing Cuddyer and giving up the draft pick than letting him sign with the Rockies and then trying to negotiate a trade for him. So they pulled the trigger.

  “The team criticized for lack of financial boldness scored the first multi-year free-agent contract of this offseason,” Joel Sherman wrote in the New York Post. “That means nothing in the won-lost column, but for an organization that needs to re-establish credibility with its fan base, scoring psychological points is nice. This was a move that screamed—with the first-round pick forfeited and dollars spent—contention now.”

  The Mets were long gone from the days when Alderson would joke “What outfield?” They had a Gold Glove center fielder, a veteran right fielder who they were still hoping would bounce back to thirty-homer power, and now an interesting addition for the other corner outfield position. Alderson had gone to great pains to get people in the organization—and the media—to see the Mets in a new light, and the Cuddyer move turned out to be helpful in that regard as well.

  “The ironic additional aspect to this,” Alderson told me, “was the public relations impact of actually giving up the draft pick, which in many ways was more valuable than the draft pick itself, because it was evidence to people that we’re going for it. This is no longer player development. This is game time!”

  Going into baseball’s annual winter meetings, Mets people were upbeat about the Cuddyer signing and the sense that the hard work of developing young talent was starting to pay off. Down in the crowded lobby of the Manchester Grand Hyatt along the San Diego waterfront, which was buzzing with conversation at all hours, anyone from the Mets I happened to spot tended to have a jaunty, purposeful look that was in stark contrast to the uneasy mood for the winter meetings at the Gaylord Opryland two years earlier. I ran into J. P. Ricciardi near the elevator bank and he flashed an easy, upbeat grin. Everyone in the organization was well aware that they’d accomplished nothing yet, but they had a strong collective feeling that they were close to breaking through and it felt good.

  “In past years we felt we needed to do something at the winter meetings to make a statement,” Paul DePodesta said. “As we look at our club, we’re certainly not a complete team yet and we’re not where we want to be, but the foundation is in place and there is not the need to do something just to make news. We have almost our entire club returning and getting a year older, which in our situation means better, since most of them are young, and we have Harvey and Parnell coming back. There’s certainly
a lot more optimism around the organization now.”

  For the Mets’ contingent, as for the twenty-nine other clubs in attendance, the winter meetings meant sequestering themselves in their suite around the clock to sift through fresh information coming in and try to make creative choices about what deals or acquisitions might work. Alderson loves the camaraderie of these long sessions. “We talk about what’s going on, what people have heard about down in the lobby, throw out ideas,” he told me one night during the meetings. “It’s a mixing bowl.” Back in San Diego for the first time in years, with warm weather and breathtaking views, these winter meetings had a bouncy, lively feel. “I love walking around the lobby,” Alderson says. “The problem, now, is that when I walk around, I usually end up with two or three résumés. But I actually do like hanging around down there. It’s kind of fun.”