As it turns out, the Mets’ offseason pursuit of Billy Beane wasn’t a pipe dream, after all.
On Tuesday’s episode of The Post’s “The Show” podcast with Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman, team president Sandy Alderson maintained that the Mets had a legitimate shot to pry Beane away from the Athletics to become the club’s president of baseball operations.
“I thought we had a pretty good chance,” Alderson said. “That was based on his initial response to us. Eventually, he realized that he had a good solution in Oakland, both from a professional standpoint but also from a personal standpoint. That was kind of the cold reality.
“We thought we had a pretty good chance there. It wasn’t fool’s gold that we were pursuing. There was a legitimate possibility for a week or 10 days.”
Championed as the ingenious innovator of “Moneyball,” Beane spent 17 years as the Athletics’ general manager before becoming the executive vice president of baseball operations in 2015. During his reign, Oakland has made the postseason 11 times.
Alderson first hired Beane as an advance scout with the Athletics in 1990, and Beane eventually replaced Alderson as Oakland’s general manager in 1997.
The Mets’ painstaking search for a top baseball executive is perhaps best remembered by those the organization did not land, including Beane. New York could not get David Stearns or Matt Arnold away from Milwaukee. Theo Epstein and Mets owner Steve Cohen mutually decided Epstein wasn’t the right fit.
The winding road ultimately led to Billy Eppler, whom the Mets hired as their new general manager — the same role that Eppler held for five seasons with the Angels.
“I think he’s doing very well,” Alderson said of Eppler. “A general manager is evaluated in a variety of different ways. One is talent acquisition. That relates to talent evaluation as well as the ability to actually acquire somebody. That comes up mostly in the offseason and it comes up at the trade deadline. By most measures, and obviously it’s not perfect, but our offseason was very productive under difficult circumstances.
“… Otherwise, it’s the day-to-day management of the roster, the relationship with the manager, those sort of housekeeping things that keep the train running. He’s very detail-oriented and I think he has done a great job managing the waiver wire, managing our roster with some of the challenges we’ve had with injuries. From my standpoint, I’m very pleased with what he’s been able to do.”
