CARLSBAD, Calif. — The Yankees were a mess in the early 1990s, so much worse on and off the field than the Mets are now.
After the 1992 season — the first in which Gene Michael and Buck Showalter formed a general manager-manager tandem — a decision was made to try to upgrade significantly. They fixated on the market for starting pitching and identified the right two free agents: Greg Maddux and David Cone.
They thought they had Maddux, but the Yankees were so undesirable he pivoted and took less to join the Braves. Cone, who adored New York, agreed to return to his native Kansas City. Desperate, the Yankees ranked the next six best free agents and had the first five — Chris Bosio, Doug Drabek, Jose Guzman, Pete Schourek and Greg Swindell — reject them.
That left the last guy on their list. The Yankees signed Jimmy Key to a four-year, $17 million contract. And Key, as much as any player before the Core Four’s arrival, became the fulcrum for the Yankees going from laughingstocks to a champions. Key proved impervious to New York while performing brilliantly.
I offer this to suggest that an avenue remains for the Mets to survive the criticism and the sense of disarray in their search for someone to head baseball operations. Billy Beane, Theo Epstein and David Stearns were the Maddux and Cone of this process. There have been a lot of Bosio and Schourek types refusing to even have a conversation with the Mets.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the search was centering on former Nationals assistant GM Adam Cromie, a rather anonymous executive who left in 2017 to join a law firm. He kept his hand in baseball by helping a few teams with arbitration cases. Friends of his in the game described a smart, tough, ambitious person who rose from an internship at the analytic website Baseball Info Solutions (Rays GM Erik Neander also was an intern at that time). He helped to modernize the Nationals’ analytics department in 2010, gaining more and more power and influence with Washington before departing.
The Mets appeared on the verge of diverting from the main path to gamble on a side street. Sandy Alderson said during a Tuesday press briefing that the Mets were going to get the hire right. What else would the team president say? But also, of course, that is all that will matter in the end. Can the Mets find someone impervious to New York who performs brilliantly regardless of where that person was ranked before the process began?
The Yankees might have been ridiculed for failing to land their big fish in Maddux and Cone and then having a bunch of comparative guppies also spurn them. History will show they signed Key, who nearly won a Cy Young for them, then served as the unflappable No. 3 starter on a championship team. Would Cromie be that kind of hire? Or would he be a failure from an exhausted list?
Alderson said the Mets would “not just hire someone to fill the spot. Steve [Cohen] has a high standard. I believe I have a high standard. I believe we will get the right person.”
Having said that, Alderson admitted, “We already have blown through what people would say is a reasonable timeline [to make a hire].”
Indeed, they were at the GM meetings, without a GM. For the second straight year, they have eliminated a search for a president of baseball operations because they could not find someone suitable for that elevated position and, thus, were just again looking for a GM.
Alderson said the lack of candidates reflect people under contracts who cannot gain permission to interview and those who do not want to be part of the process because of fear of the New York market, though I can’t remember any other New York team, since George Steinbrenner was at his villainous worst, struggling this much to get qualified candidates to interview for major positions — especially when you consider it has been two years of this.
Alderson acknowledged there remains uncertainty and trepidation about working for Cohen, but downplayed it (though many candidates I have spoken to insist it is a big issue, just as many used to privately bow out because of Steinbrenner). Alderson said worries about his over-reach as team president were misguided because, he insisted, he gave more and more responsibility without obstruction to Zack Scott during last season, although Scott just had an interim GM tag.
He called concerns about the presence and influence of his son, assistant GM Bryn Alderson, “a red herring,” saying there was a “firewall” around this search and Bryn does not even know who is being interviewed. Still, a sense permeates that Alderson would hire someone who would protect the job of his son. Welcome irony, because in his own stint as GM, Alderson bristled at the interference of Jeff Wilpon, who but for nepotism would never have been positioned to influence a major league operation. Would Bryn Alderson be an assistant GM on any of the other 29 teams?
Sandy Alderson also agreed some candidates were hesitant because of the prospect the Mets will hire a president of baseball operations (Stearns?) a year from now, putting the new GM at risk immediately with a new boss. But Alderson said the new GM will have a one-year runway to prove themself. Is that enough to get the best to apply or accept?
There also is a sense of dysfunction that continues to envelop this organization from the field to the executive level. Alderson agreed that is the “narrative,” but that in the day-to-day running of the franchise there have been substantial upgrades to the baseball and business operations and that the Mets have to get to the point where “reality becomes perception, as well.”
All of this is part of the mountain that has blocked the Mets from making a speedy, popular hire to change the conversation away from incompetence. But, really, this plays familiarly to where the Yankees were nearly three decades ago and they made decisions in that 1992-93 offseason — notably signing Key and trading for Paul O’Neill — that began shifting their trajectory.
It emphasized you just have to get it right — whether through fortune or brilliance. The same is true for Alderson, Cohen and the Mets now. They have to make their own Key decision.