CARLSBAD, Calif. — The elephant in the promenade stood toward the back Wednesday afternoon, a good 20 feet away from Sandy Alderson as the Mets’ president engaged with a significant media throng wondering when the club would end its Odyssey-like search for a new baseball operations head.
The answer appears to be soon. And, on the other hand, quite possibly not soon at all.
It sure looks as if the Mets are poised to name Adam Cromie as their general manager. Cromie is a man whose very existence most of the team’s fan base and even many of the media assigned to cover the franchise (guilty as charged) did not know about until Tuesday, when The Washington Post broke the story of his candidacy. The unconventional hire of a man who had climbed only as high as assistant GM with the Nationals and left the industry in 2017 for a full-time career in law, doesn’t quite match the Mets’ ambitions of matching what the Dodgers did in 2014, when they landed superstar executive Andrew Friedman from the Rays.
Bringing aboard David Stearns a year from now, on the other hand, would very much clear such a high bar. If Cromie could achieve his potential, take the next year to stabilize the Mets, and then welcome Stearns above him? That could work. Many, many industry folks expect that very scenario to come to fruition.
Stearns, the aforementioned elephant in the promenade who had no Milwaukee reporters to address, declined comment for this column, which makes sense given that he currently works as the Brewers’ president of baseball operations. Milwaukee owner Mark Attanasio, who hired Stearns as his GM in September 2015 and has seen Stearns guide the small-market organization to four straight playoff appearances, denied the Mets’ request to interview Stearns earlier this offseason. Stearns has a contract for next season, but his contractual status for 2023 can best be described as murky.
Other details, however, provide some clarity: Stearns is a Manhattan native who attended high school there, still has family there and … wait for it … grew up rooting for the Mets. He worked for the Mets, briefly, after graduating from Harvard, and also spent time working at Major League Baseball’s Manhattan headquarters, where he made a positive impression on the bigwigs there.
Stearns, Theo Epstein and Billy Beane topped Cohen’s list for this endeavor. Epstein quickly passed due to lack of fit and Beane took a little longer before bowing out due to family considerations. After experiencing enough rejections to make Bill Murray’s courting of Andie MacDowell in “Groundhog Day” appear short and sweet, it appears that the Mets want to go to a less-experienced person, who possesses not only potential, but also the willingness to adapt to a deputy role, even if the title remained the same.
“Assuming we only hire one person, there will be at least a year’s runway for that person to demonstrate their ability and their potential,” Alderson said Tuesday, shortly before Cromie’s name emerged publicly. “I’ve said this to others in the past, that’s the opportunity. That’s all you can ask for. And demonstrated ability tends to get rewarded.”
It doesn’t feel remarkably different from the Mets’ hiring of Jared Porter about 11 months ago, although Porter had been working actively in baseball at the time. Porter barely took off before crashing. The disclosure of his past wrongdoing caused him to get fired after about five weeks (and then acting GM Zack Scott made it less than a year before a run-in with the law and its aftermath ended his tenure), yet there surely existed a scenario in which Porter could have performed well enough to stay while reporting to a new PoBo.
Stearns and Cromie are said to know each other only a little from Cromie’s time with the Nationals. Nevertheless, if Cromie wins the sweepstakes by the end of this week, he’ll do so with a general understanding that he might represent only Phase One of Cohen’s second mission to get this right. We’ll see a year from now which media group, huge or empty, Stearns is addressing.