About 20 minutes before baseball’s trade deadline on July 31, the New York Mets’ top baseball executives were holed up in a conference room at Citi Field, nearly out of options for filling their dire need for a formidable hitter in the lineup.
Two days before, the Mets, and everyone else, thought they had a deal for outfielder Carlos Gomez of the Milwaukee Brewers, only to see it fall apart spectacularly for reasons that have been disputed. The Mets had then turned their attention to talks with at least three other teams: the San Diego Padres, about outfielder Justin Upton; the Cincinnati Reds, who had outfielder Jay Bruce to offer; and the Detroit Tigers, who had outfielder Yoenis Cespedes. As the deadline drew close, efforts to acquire Upton and Bruce fizzled.
One last time, they discussed whether to make a last-ditch trade for Cespedes. Jeff Wilpon, the Mets’ chief operating officer, was in the room, along with Sandy Alderson, the general manager, and two of his assistants — John Ricco and Paul DePodesta. Another assistant, J.P. Ricciardi, called in remotely, and members of the analytics team and baseball operations staff popped in and out.
It was Cespedes or nothing, and several Mets executives had doubts about acquiring him for various reasons, including the possibility that the team would have his services for only two months. His contract is set to expire at the end of the season.
Interviews with numerous members of the Mets’ organization, who insisted on anonymity in discussing internal team deliberations, showed that the decision to trade for Cespedes was hardly unanimous. Some good fortune — and last-minute judgment — brought Cespedes to Queens. His arrival has been a season-altering moment.
In the course of 52 games, Cespedes has drastically transformed the Mets from a pitching-heavy club that was barely above .500 to a potent, at times fearsome, team that has clinched the National League East and expecting a deep postseason run.
After the Gomez trade unraveled, Jim Leyland had called Terry Collins, the Mets’ manager. The two men are close — Leyland, when he was the Pittsburgh Pirates’ manager, gave Collins his first coaching job in the major leagues. And Leyland, as a former manager of the Tigers who was now serving as an adviser to the team, wanted to make sure Collins and the Mets knew that Cespedes was available.
The Mets were intrigued by Cespedes’ bat. But as they considered their options, at least a few members of their front office had concerns. They wondered if Cespedes, normally a left fielder, could play center field regularly if needed. They were unsure how he would make the transition to the National League, where he had never played, having spent his career with the Oakland Athletics, the Boston Red Sox and then the Tigers.
They thought his approach at the plate was too wild, that he chased bad pitches and did not walk enough, which was against the Mets’ general hitting philosophy. And then there was the glaring fact that he would become a free agent at the end of the season.
The Mets were also leery about the asking price. In exchange for Cespedes, the Tigers wanted a top pitching prospect, Michael Fulmer, whom the Mets drafted in the first round in 2011. Last month, Fulmer was named pitcher of the year in the Class AA Eastern League, where he posted better statistics than Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom did at that level.
With the clock about to run out on the trading deadline, a decision had to be made. So Alderson went around the conference room, taking a vote, to hear everyone’s final thoughts. There was still some dissension on making the trade. But Alderson had the final call.
Alderson had been inclined all along to make a deal. The Mets had just slogged through six straight losing seasons, four with him in charge. The fan base was growing frustrated with all the losing and with the team’s modest payroll. How was it, fans complained loudly, that the Mets, finally blessed with so much talented young pitching, could still not find a way to bolster their lineup?
Alderson heard the grumbling. He had patiently rebuilt the Mets while carefully hoarding the team’s resources. To him, now seemed the moment to use some of those assets to acquire a player the Mets clearly needed.
So he told his subordinates he would make the deal — Cespedes for Fulmer and one other Mets prospect — and then left the conference room to call the Tigers privately and settle the terms. But on his way out of the room, he paused to confer with Wilpon, who had been listening to the debate.
Alderson asked him, just to be sure: Was he comfortable making the deal?
“Go for it,” Wilpon told him.
Minutes later, as news of the deal was announced on the TVs in the Mets’ business offices at Citi Field, people began applauding from their desks. Even before Cespedes had put on a Mets uniform, he had provided a bolt of energy for the organization.
Since the deal, Cespedes has produced at a level that has no parallel in the team’s 53-year history. In 52 games for the Mets, he has had 17 home runs and 44 runs batted in, along with a .294 average.
But acquiring Cespedes has put the Mets in an increasingly tricky situation. The better he plays, the more Mets fans and his teammates will want him to remain on the team — and the more his price goes up when he enters free agency at the end of the season.
Jim Duquette, a former general manager of the Mets and a current analyst for MLB Network and the Mets’ cable network, SNY, guessed that Cespedes could fetch at least six years and $120 million in a new deal, or maybe seven years and $140 million. No matter the amount, it will be a lot more than the Mets have appeared inclined to pay players in recent years. The one exception was the eight-year, $138 million deal they gave David Wright in 2012. But that was a special case, signing a homegrown star so that he remained a Met for life.
Duquette said Cespedes would be at the top of a 2015 free-agent class that is likely to include some other impressive names, like Upton, Jason Heyward (St. Louis), Alex Gordon (Kansas City) and Chris Davis (Baltimore). And yet Cespedes will also turn 30 in October, which will leave whatever team signs him to a multiyear deal having to pay him lavishly in his 30s for what he accomplished in his 20s. That is an unpopular concept in baseball.
As Duquette said, in reference to Cespedes: “Guys who have big-time power, high strikeout rates and don’t walk — at some point you stop making solid contact because of the age factor. At the end of the contract, what’s left in that type of player? When it goes, it has a chance to go fast.”
Alderson also generally avoids giving out such contracts. He learned his trade by working with the small-market Athletics, who are prudent when it comes to spending money on players. He often preaches weighing a player’s cost versus his output in building what he calls a “quality, sustainable, winning team.”
Cespedes’ agents, though, are not likely to give the Mets a discount. He is co-represented by Roc Nation Sports and Creative Artists Agency, and together they got Robinson Cano a 10-year, $240 million contract with the Seattle Mariners. Brodie Van Wagenen, the CAA agent who negotiated that deal, is expected to lead Cespedes’ negotiations, too.
Back in 2013, Alderson, Wilpon, Van Wagenen and Jay Z, the founder of Roc Nation, had dinner when Cano was a free agent, but the Mets were never considered serious bidders. Van Wagenen is also the agent for deGrom, who will surely command a big deal in a few years.
When Cespedes arrived as an international free agent in 2012, as a Cuban defector, he signed a four-year, $36 million contract with the Athletics with his next payday already in mind. Adam Katz, his original agent, included an unusual provision in that four-year deal that would allow Cespedes to hit the market at the end of 2015 without receiving a qualifying offer from the team he had been playing for.
The provision was designed so that Cespedes could maximize the value of his second contract, but it also set a daunting five-day deadline for his previous team to re-sign him.
Recently, Van Wagenen agreed to change that provision, removing the deadline so that the Mets could negotiate with Cespedes just like any other team. At the very least, the Mets would now have a fighting chance.
In Oakland, however, general manager Billy Beane had assumed he would never be able to keep Cespedes when the original contract ran out. So at the July 2014 trade deadline, he shipped him to Boston for Jon Lester, an ace he thought the Athletics would ride deep into the postseason.
Cespedes was jolted by the news. Oakland was all he knew, the team he had helped take to the playoffs twice. That night, Ryan Cook, one of Cespedes’ closest friends on the A’s, went to his house to commiserate. They stood around the fire pit outside the house and talked.
“He was really torn up about it,” Cook said.
In Boston, without the excitement of a winning team, Cespedes did not perform as expected. He clashed with one of the team’s coaches and developed a reputation as a player who lacks motivation when his team is out of contention. The Mets, however, have been a different story.
“A team like the Mets, if they give him a good offer, he’s going to stay,” said Ariel Prieto, Cespedes’ interpreter in Oakland. “He wants to compete; that’s what’s most important to this kid. He wants to be a part of that. That’s why he’s doing good over there, because he knows they have a good chance to go to the playoffs or even go all the way through.”
For a time in Oakland, Prieto lived with Cespedes and helped handle his daily schedule. While Cespedes had a taste for flashy cars, Prieto said he had a modest lifestyle and often enjoyed staying at home, watching Spanish soap operas and kung fu movies.
“I do not go out,” Cespedes said. “I really don’t. I play golf. That’s the only time I go out.”
Beane, Cespedes’ first boss in the majors, said: “He’s a good guy — very quiet and very serious. I don’t know that you can ask for more, as an organization. You want all your players to be exactly like that.”
Shortly after the trade to the Mets, Prieto called Cespedes to catch up. He said Cespedes went on about how well the Mets had treated him.
Indeed, in interviews, Cespedes says all the right things, how he wants to bring the “big trophy” to New York, that he loves the city and his teammates. One day recently, he had a blue-and-orange golf bag adorned with the Mets logo sitting at his locker in the clubhouse.
“They’ve really supported me,” Cespedes said of the Mets. “I feel like I’m with family.”
Some Mets fans are so happy that they have jokingly offered to start a grass-roots campaign to help the Mets pay for his next contract. Jerry Seinfeld, perhaps the most prominent Mets fan, sends Cespedes admiring notes on Twitter.
“I love watching you!” he gushed in one.
“My whole family loves you,” he said in another.
But the love affair may end come November, when Alderson and the Mets reconvene in that conference room and debate this time whether they should haggle with Van Wagenen and try to re-sign Cespedes to a very expensive new deal. Who will vote to keep him?
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