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Back when everything was new and new – what was it, two whole weeks ago? – Sandy Alderson described his new place in the Mets baseball hierarchy as team president this way: “I have a seat at the table, but I don’t sit at the head of the table.”
On Monday, he had to change that a bit.
“Come around the corner a bit,” he joked. “Maybe we can have a round table and I’m the one who has a seat with arms.”
The Mets discovered that while Steve Cohen’s arrival at the property offices might have passed with an approval rating of around 95% among those who would someday soon be buying Conforto shirts, game tickets and sandwiches at Mama’s of Corona, that didn’t mean the rest of baseball was just going to allow them to loot their executive offices without a fight.
This means Alderson will have a much bigger stake in upcoming baseball decisions than he originally thought, at least for about a year, and instead of hiring a president of baseball operations to pull out these final decisions of his plate, he ” I’m going to focus for now on hiring a CEO. For now, he’ll be a guy to help Alderson with the heavy lifting of the day-to-day work, and Alderson said he wouldn’t mind if it could be a mentor-protege relationship that could elevate him at some point.
While that also means the Mets’ best baseball position will remain vacant for a year – which also happens to be the length of time before Theo Epstein’s contractual commitment to the Cubs expires. Epstein has talked about not wanting to return to this rat race, and maybe he’s committed to it. We will see.
For now, Alderson has a real opportunity that few executives in any sport have ever had: the chance to change a legacy, the chance to rewrite a recent chapter of what has been, on the whole, a distinguished baseball life.
It didn’t end well for Alderson with the Mets. It was he who saw the greatness of Mickey Callaway. He was the one who pulled the trigger on Yoenis Cespedes (although there were loads of people who were 100% with him about it, despite what they are saying now). He was the one who watched the Mets go from a three-game back-to-back playoff team in 2015 to a hot mess in the dregs of the NL East.
On the day he left in June 2018 – a sad day punctuated by his revelation that he had had a recurrence of cancer – Alderson had said, on the record and for all to see, “If I were to watch him on merit, I am not sure the return is justified.
It was hard to believe then he thought this. It’s harder now. Alderson – who said Monday his health was good and “was not at all a consideration” in agreeing to take on the added burden of baseball – never shot directly at the group of owners who just left. But when he appeared in the Zoom Room for Two Men Welfare on Cohen’s first day at work, he certainly looked – and looked – like a man given a reprieve.
It’s more than that now. For at least a year, it’s a Mets team that will have Alderson’s fingerprints all over it. Part of that is because of the good job he did here the first time around despite the financial constraints, writing well, providing a healthy and professional everyday outlook.
All of the Mets’ most intriguing local assets – Pete Alonso, Jeff McNeil, Michael Conforto, Andres Gimenez, Amed Rosario, Dom Smith – were either drafted or signed off during Alderson’s first term. He didn’t draft Jacob deGrom but accelerated him to Flushing once the former shortstop showed flashes of his bright future. Arnaud-et-Noah Syndergaard’s RA Dickey-for-Travis deal was one of the most partial in Mets history. And he has the ’15 NL flag on his resume.
He wasn’t a perfect CEO, and while it’s easy to blame the bulk of these bad decisions on the Wilpon regime’s tax handcuffs, not all was wrong because of it. But he is quite right. He now has the chance to leave one last gift of departure before handing over the reins to the future architect of the Mets, whoever he is.
This is exactly the last chapter he deserves as a baseball man. Assuming he got the last chapter right.
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