“You know how to take the reservation. You just don’t know how to hold the reservation.”
— Jerry, “Seinfeld”
It would be generous to suggest that Jeff Wilpon said all the right things Sunday afternoon at Citi Field, as the Mets’ COO held a rare interview session to discuss the state of his team. He didn’t. Sandy Alderson got too much blame, and you won’t feel any better now about the team’s payroll aspirations than you did previously.
Nevertheless, on the Wilpon family public-speaking scale, this one registered as a win. Jeff Wilpon affirmed that the Mets’ next head of baseball operations, with a title to be determined, will come from the outside, the right call. And in the wake of Saturday night’s wonderful farewell to David Wright, Wilpon saluted the Mets’ hopelessly devoted fan base and vowed, “We owe them something more than what we’ve given them.”
He means that, I believe. Yet the question, to borrow a concept from the longtime Mets fan Mr. Seinfeld as he stood at a sitcom rental-car counter, remains the same as eight years ago, when the Mets’ search for a general manager landed on Alderson: They know how to take a new baseball-operations vision. Do they know how to hold a new baseball-operations vision?
“If I had the answers, I would fix it, obviously,” Wilpon said, when asked to explain how the Mets had managed just six winning seasons out of the 16 since his family bought out Nelson Doubleday in 2002. “We’re not in the business to lose money. We’re not in the business to lose games. Ask any owner in any other sports league, including ours.
“We want to win. Have we made some bad choices? Yeah, we probably have made some bad choices. On personnel. On players. On different things. We’ve got to try and do better.”
Alderson’s successor will have carte blanche, Wilpon said … although he personally would like to see the interim front-office triumvirate of Omar Minaya, J.P. Ricciardi and John Ricco stick around, and the same goes for rookie manager Mickey Callaway, who in turn would like to keep all of his coaches, and trading any of the starting pitchers doesn’t sound like a desired option, either.
As for the payroll: “It always starts out at a number, and it always exceeds that number,” Wilpon said, which allows for a simple solution: Just raise the original number by about $40 million and they’ll be good to go!
Wilpon spoke of “untraditional candidates,” with respected agent Casey Close among the novel options (he seems like a long shot), and also of pursuing current GMs. Sure, go for it. The Mets should think creatively, aim high and spend high, just as they did on Alderson and his deputies, who enjoyed the successes of 2015 and 2016 before things went wrong.
The goal should be to avoid the ugly goodbye that greeted Alderson, who got shade from Wilpon for not requesting a larger payroll or a bigger analytics staff as well as this assessment of this year’s Mets roster: “Even though the effort’s there, the talent wasn’t, and that’s something the new GM is going to have to work on.”
That Minaya, before Alderson, got a similar send-off — and Steve Phillips, back in 2003 — creates a pattern that makes this bigger than any one GM.
The Wilpons must lift the restraints, fiscal and philosophical, for the next big hire if they want to avoid the condemnation of repeating history. The micromanaging and the fretting over the daily media coverage must cease. The attendance, which has dropped by 564,607 in the past two seasons, must be the byproduct of, rather than the impetus to, their decisions.
I asked Jeff Wilpon if ownership had performed a 360-degree review since Alderson’s medical leave of absence in June.
“I think that’s probably right on target,” he said. “We haven’t called it a 360 review, but that’s what we’ve done.”
The results and application of that stated review, even more than the identity of the person whose hiring will next bring us to Citi Field for an introductory press conference, will determine whether the Mets can stick with a plan and erase their fans’ longstanding reservations about their future.