Steve Phillips has many mouths to feed. Most years, when the baseball season ends, New York’s back pages turn their attention to basketball, the city’s other great sports love. In 1998, the NBA has been locked out since July, with owners and players feuding over proposed salary cap changes. Football comes but once a week and even a strong season from the Jets can fill only so many columns. Hockey has its ardent fans but fails to capture the city’s attention unless a team is pulling off some sort of miracle, and miracles do not appear on the horizon for any of the NHL locals. Thus it falls to Steve Phillips to provide for the sports scribes, who pounce on every scrap of Mets news that emerges in the cold months and gnaw it down to the marrow.

By all rights the Yankees should dominate offseason sports talk, having executed a season for the ages: 125 wins between the regular season and the playoffs, on their way to capturing a second World Series title in three years. The only thing the Yankees can’t do is leave any question marks. A few of the Yankees’ best players are set to become free agents, but the impending negotiations are expected to end with all of them remaining in pinstripes. George Steinbrenner makes some waves by attempting to broker a sale of the Yankees to Cablevision, the pay TV giant that also owns the NBA’s Knicks, the NHL’s Rangers, and Madison Square Garden. Such a sale would send shockwaves through the sports business landscape, but boardroom chess doesn’t make for sexy sports page copy. Writers can’t even pen schoolyard what-if’s pondering how the Yanks can improve in 1999. What could mark an improvement on 125 wins?

Thus, the back pages lean heavily on the Mets all winter long. When news of Met moves is scarce, the papers resort to rumors, gentle suggestions, and shouts to the heavens as to what the team must do, adopting the mantle of fan advocate. In every aggrieved syllable the scribes spill in the offseason, they express the belief that the newspapers are but vessels through which the passions of their readers flow. They believe this because those same readers have few other means of making their voices heard. With the internet in its relative infancy, the dailies have little competition as self-appointed Voice Of The Fans. (Their closest rival is sports talk radio, influential in its own right but more limited in impact due to the ephemeral nature of the medium.)

Scan the back pages in the offseason and hear each newspaper play the same tune in different keys: the Times’s Ivy League affectations, the Daily News’s Joe Lunchpail plainspeak, the Post’s Neanderthal populism, and Long Island’s Newsday landing in the limited space allowed by the rest. On the subject of the Mets, the song goes like this: The collapse of 1998 calls for swift and drastic countermeasures. The fans demand it, the papers say.

The first item on Steve Phillips’s agenda is to resign Al Leiter and Mike Piazza. “Losing either of them would serve as an enormous public relations blow at a time when the club can ill-afford negative publicity,” the Daily News warns. The excitable Leiter, as incapable of adopting a poker face off the mound as he is on it, is seen as the easier sell. Piazza is much harder to read. Reports say he is open to returning, provided the Mets can demonstrate a willingness to do what it takes to win. (Translation: Spend the dough to resign Leiter and then we’ll talk.) But the signals he gave off during his first year in New York were mixed at best.

When the catcher struggled in his first month as a Met, he drew impatient boos from fans who smelled another overpriced star incapable of coping on New York’s big stage. The pop psychologists in the press surmised Piazza was too much of a “California guy,” too laid back to play in a city that demanded he take the sport seriously. (The “California guy” label was pinned on him due to his days with the Los Angeles Dodgers, ignoring a youth spent in the suburbs of Philadelphia.) His slump was chalked up to a preoccupation with visions of how much money he would receive as a free agent. The Mets themselves implied they were in no hurry to ink Piazza to a long-term deal when Steve Phillips insisted the team had “other options” behind the plate—Todd Hundley, namely, who was desperate to abandon his failed experiments in the outfield.

The war of words came to a head in August after a report “circulated widely on the internet” (a novel concept in 1998) said Piazza had already decided he would not resign with the Mets. Hoping to nip all such rumors in the bud, Piazza called a press conference at which he told the collected sports press he hadn’t made up his mind yet but would not negotiate a new contract during the season, and would not answer any questions about a new contract during the season, either.

Freed from the burden of constant contract questions, Piazza proceeded to tear the cover off the ball for the rest of the season. His torrid streak stopped the fans from booing, but his refusal to speak on the subject of his free agency added fuel to the theory that New York, with its relentless media coverage, was not the place for him.

The catcher himself isn’t sure where he wants to be until season’s end when he returns to his home in California and finds it missing…something. It is that unnamable thing about New York, that energy that drives some mad and drives other to greatness. Mike Piazza now counts himself in the latter category, a development that shocks everyone, Piazza included.

On October 25, 1998, Piazza inks a seven-year, $91 million deal, making him the richest Met ever and the highest paid player in the game. Some point out the inconvenient fact that Piazza will be 37 when the contract runs out, an unhappy age for most catchers. The team is resigned to crossing that bridge once they reach it. The length of the contract is a mere trifle if it means retaining the best hitter the Mets have ever had. Nelson Doubleday, breaking his usual silence, goes so far as to refer to the deal as “a bargain.” Soon after Piazza’s deal is announced, the second domino falls when Al Leiter resigns with the Mets on a four-year, $32 million contract.

The Piazza pact produces a ripple effect throughout the game, raising the market price of all free agents, much to the dismay of George Steinbrenner. “I think that all of baseball has been a bit shocked,” Steinbrenner tells reporters upon hearing the news of Piazza’s record contract. “I hear that others are quite upset.” It is a classic slice of Steinbrennerian transference, proclaiming his own displeasure as something being expressed by the game in general. In his own mind, George Steinbrenner is baseball.

The Boss is miffed because the Piazza deal complicates his own efforts to retain centerfielder Bernie Williams, one of his best hitters. Williams’s agent, Scott Boras, makes it known that anyone wishing to sign his client will have to approach, if not surpass, Piazza’s numbers. “We now know what a premium player is worth when negotiating with one team,” Boras says, licking his chops. “As to what a premium player is worth when negotiating with multiple teams, that has yet to be determined.” Though Williams flirts with a few suitors, including (gulp) the Red Sox, he decides to return to the Yankees, inking a seven-year, $87.5 million contract.

George Steinbrenner’s worries about the rising cost of doing business might hold water if expressed by anyone other than George Steinbrenner, longtime lavisher of free agent contracts and architect of the cash-grabbing Adidas deal. A month after the Piazza deal, when Steinbrenner is negotiating a potential sale of a stake in the Yankees to Cablevision, one of his underlings even says The Boss is “looking for Piazza money.” The Steinbrenner-Cablevision deal will fall through, in large part because the owner insists not only on maintaining control of the Yankees, but receiving ample compensation for his labor as well.

Of all people, Steinbrenner should know that the Mets are assembling their team in the accepted manner circa 1999. He pioneered checkbook construction at the dawn of free agency and has employed it ever since. The Mets are doing no less than their competition. If anything, they’re late to the game. The Marlins transformed from a struggling young franchise into a World Series champion in 1997 thanks to a spending spree that bought them the likes of Kevin Brown, Gary Sheffield, and Al Leiter. The Orioles returned to the playoffs in the mid 1990s by importing the bats of Roberto Alomar, Rafael Palmeiro, and B.J. Surhoff. The Red Sox couldn’t develop their own ace, so they traded for Pedro Martínez from the cash-strapped Expos and signed him to a costly extension. Even the Braves, who tend to produce more viable players from their farm system than most teams, added Greg Maddux to their rotation in 1993, and have periodically beefed up their lineups with sluggers such as Fred McGriff and Andrés Galarraga.

The bright prospects for free agents are a far cry from the late 1980s, when every owner not named George Steinbrenner illegally colluded to suppress player salaries. Many superstars of that era found their services unwanted, as team executives viewed each new free agent as an opportunity to put the hired help back in their place. The most egregious example was Andre Dawson, all-world outfielder for the Expos, who became a free agent after the 1986 season. When he made it known he wished to play in a stadium without artificial turf, since the carpet in Montréal had been murder on his knees, the league punished him for his insolence. Throughout the winter, Dawson discovered that, despite impressive career numbers, his services were not wanted by any major league team. One of the best players in the game was forced to crawl to the Cubs during spring training, offering them a blank contract if they would employ him. Dawson went on to capture the MVP Award in his first season in Chicago, while the players’ union, galled by the blatant game-fixing that Dawson’s struggles exposed, went on to sue the league for collusion. The players won their day in court, but the victory was shortlived, as the owners soon proposed a salary cap to enforce lower paydays in a more legal manner. The ensuing bad blood led to the devastating 1994 strike that forced the first cancellation of the World Series in 90 years. Fans saved most of their rage for the assumed greed of the players, but the players’ hardline stance was inspired by the owners’ salary conspiracy of the previous decade.

By the winter of 1998, this unpleasantness already has the feel of ancient history. Collusion is dead and buries, killed by rampant inflation. Each winter, the latest crop of free agents drives salaries to heights never seen before, only to be surpassed by the next offseason market. Mike Piazza’s contract reigns as the richest in baseball for a few glorious weeks before pitcher Kevin Brown signs with the Dodgers to the tune of seven years and $105 million. When the checkbooks are put back in their holsters, MLB commits a grand total of $481.5 million to six lucky players this offseason—Piazza, Brown, Williams, sluggers Mo Vaughn (Angels) and Albert Belle (Orioles), and fearsome southpaw Randy Johnson (Diamondbacks).

The franchises with money to burn are from large media markets, their willingness to spend spurred by the boatloads of cash generated by regional sports networks and brand new stadiums. When the Baltimore Orioles opened Camden Yards in 1992, its retro-quirks and smaller seating capacity made it a cash cow for the team, which used the stadium-generated revenue to join in on the free agent feeding frenzies. The success of Camden Yards set off a game of Keeping Up With the Joneses, as teams scrambled to petition their cities for brand new stadiums, fearing they might be left out in baseball’s latest arms race.

Teams from smaller media markets don’t command the broadcast or advertising revenue that larger market teams do, and tend to be in a far worse position to petition cash-strapped cities to foot the bill for new facilities. Without cable and new stadium cash to sustain them, these teams have little chance of landing the big names that become available in the offseason. This sets in motion a vicious cycle: Failing to sign pricey stars leads to fielding a bad starting nine, which leads to poor attendance and bad ratings, which pushes down revenues even more, which makes their respective cities even less likely to pony up the dough for new stadiums.

Witness the Montréal Expos, whose desire to replace the charmless and crumbling Olympic Stadium continues to go unconsummated. With no new arena and no regional sports network to pay big bucks for their broadcast rights, the Expos must scrape by with league-low revenues of $35 million. This translates to a payroll of $8.3 million, which wouldn’t buy them a full season of Mike Piazza. (An unfavorable exchange rate against the American dollar, which has prevailed throughout the 1990s, doesn’t do the Expos any favors either.) Their countrymen, the Toronto Blue Jays, began the decade by opening the sport’s first retractable roof stadium and winning consecutive championships. They end it with their payroll flexibility held hostage by the lease on that stadium, which became outmoded once the league was gripped by Camden-Mania. The Minnesota Twins, another team that started the decade as winners but have fallen on hard times, throw in the towel before the 1999 season has even started by declaring payroll will be slashed to somewhere in the $10–15 million range. The Kansas City Royals do much the same thing by cutting an already modest payroll of $32 million in half. The Seattle Mariners declare they will make good faith efforts to sign extensions with their two biggest stars, Ken Griffey, Jr. and Alex Rodriguez, but everyone knows this is more face-saving measure than a reflection of reality. Both players are sure to test a free agent market that grows more lucrative with each passing year.

In the eyes of the have-nots, the landscape of baseball at the end of the twentieth century has little room for teams who don’t play in huge media markets. Reacting to the record-setting Kevin Brown contract, Larry Lucchino—president of Brown’s now-former team, the San Diego Padres—moans, “The apocalypse is upon us.” Lucchino’s extreme choice of words are caused, in part, by the frustration of seeing Brown sign with his much richer neighbors to the north, and the impossibility of competing with the deep pockets of the Dodgers and their new owners, the juggernaut FOX corporation. The Dodgers’ payroll in 1999 may run $20 million more than the Padres will earn in revenue during the entire season.

Jim Bowden, general manager of the Cincinnati Reds, suggests realigning the divisions by economics rather than geography, an arrangement that would give automatic playoff slots to a few of the poorer teams. It’s a radical proposal to be sure, almost socialist in its redistribution of postseason wealth, but many teams feel radical change is required in order to affect any change in the game’s competitive imbalance. Those so inclined also believe such change will need to happen soon. MLB’s labor agreement is set to expire after the 2001 season, at which point efforts to alleviate the conundrum of poorer teams may cause another tooth-and-nail fight over salaries. Players’ union head Donald Fehr has declared a salary cap is a non-starter in future negotiations. The game’s recent offensive explosion, with homers flying out of ballparks at unprecedented rates, brought back fans who swore they’d never watch baseball again after the strike of 1994. It culminated with a race between the Cardinals’ Mark McGwire and the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa throughout the summer of 1998, to see which slugger would break the single-season home run record, while the entire nation looked on in childlike wonder. Fans had, it seemed, forgiven and forgotten all hard feelings from the last strike. If another strike happened, would fans be so quick to forgive again?

Half of MLB is swimming in vats of cash like Scrooge McDuck. The other half declares The end is nigh. Commissioner Bud Selig, a former owner of a small-market team, should recognize this as a serious issue that could destroy the game’s hard-won labor peace, but his response to it is tepid is at best. He does little more than announce the formation of “The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Baseball Economics” to study the problem and make recommendations. Asked to commit to a date for those recommendations to be submitted, he declines.

The Mets, who do not play in Montréal or Minnesota, pay the doomsaying little mind. Steve Phillips has telegraphed to the world that resigning Al Leiter and Mike Piazza is just the beginning of his offseason plan. The media has likewise telegraphed that these contracts had better be just the beginning. In their view, the returns of Leiter and Piazza simply restore the roster that turfed out to finish 1998. The Sporting News notes tartly:

At first glance and not through a pair of $123 million, rose-colored glasses, the Mets are the same team that lost the final five games of an unfulfilled season. A closer look suggests they are something less….[T]he Mets are only marginally closer to status quo than they are to the Braves. And that’s not close.

At the exact moment the front office needs to get down to brass tacks, Steve Phillips finds himself in the news for all the wrong reasons as he is implicated in a sexual harassment suit filed by an employee of the Mets’ spring training facility in Port St. Lucie, Florida. This would be big news at any time, but the topic of sexual harassment is particularly huge in 1998, as the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal has dominated national headlines for months. The charges should be disturbing to a team for which an awful lot of sexual misconduct—namely, the rape accusations and David Cone’s tabloid-filling lewdness of 1993—remains quite visible in the rearview mirror.

Phillips confesses to having an extramarital affair with the anonymous employee, and unnamed others to boot, but denies harassing anyone. The Mets suspend him “indefinitely,” then undermine that punishment by their choice of interim general manager. Frank Cashen, consulting for the Mets in semi-retirement, is called on as caretaker in Phillips’s absence. Some had hoped assistant general manager Omar Minaya, a close lieutenant of Phillips’s, would get the call, but that would have signaled a prolonged vacation. Installing Cashen, the GM emeritus, signals that Phillips’s hiatus will be brief.

If the Mets don’t treat the sexual harassment charges with the seriousness they warrant, neither does the sports press. Most local coverage concentrates on how Steve Phillips’s suspension will affect the Mets’ offseason plans, as it coincides with the yearly winter general managers’ meetings, the time when many blockbuster deals germinate. With very few exceptions (Bob Raissman of the Daily News, for one), no writer raises the question of whether someone accused of sexual harassment should be allowed to keep his job. The Mets judge Phillips sufficiently reformed and allow him to return to his post after eight days of “extensive personal counseling.” The threatened lawsuit is dropped soon thereafter following an undisclosed settlement. When the media launches criticism relating to the incident, they aim it not at Phillips for embarrassing his team, but at the Mets for forcing their general manager to confess and apologize at a press conference. A lengthy, sympathetic profile of Phillips in the Times compares the event to a public flogging. In the coming years, the charges are hardly mentioned again, even at the team’s most embattled moments. An unspoken agreement says that to do so would be in bad taste. On those rare occasions when the subject of the lawsuit is raised, emphasis will be placed on how much pain the incident caused Phillips. That someone else might have been victimized by his actions—say, the woman he allegedly harassed—goes unconsidered.

With Phillips temporarily on the shelf, Bobby Valentine attends the winter meetings in Nashville in the GM’s stead. A rival exec, someone who Phillips trusts implicitly, takes time out from the wheeling and dealing to drop a dime on the manager. Bobby’s badmouthing you left and right down here, the spy informs Phillips. An official from another team, no matter how trusted, might have a vested interest in sowing dissent within a rival team’s ranks, but anyone with an inkling of Bobby Valentine’s history has no problem believing he’d trash-talk his own front office when he believes he can get away with it, or that he’d resist kicking a man when he’s down. What Valentine reportedly said is never disclosed, and Phillips never confronts Valentine about the alleged “badmouthing.” Their lukewarm relationship grows cold, however, and will remain so forever after.

Back up north, Frank Cashen’s only move during his brief time back in the captain’s chair is to complete a deal set in motion by Phillips before his departure, one that ships off maligned relief pitcher Mel Rojas to the Dodgers. Rojas’s high salary ($4.5 million) and ineffectiveness on the mound made him a frequent target of fans. His pariah status was cemented during the 1998 season when he gave up a titanic go-ahead home run to Paul O’Neill in the first Subway Series game ever played at Shea Stadium.

Few Mets fans are sad to see Rojas go on November 11, but many are distressed to see who returns in the deal: Bobby Bonilla. The best that could be said of Bonilla’s first tenure with the Mets is that, unlike some of his teammates, he hadn’t thrown a firecracker or sprayed bleach at anyone. Since leaving the Mets mid-year in 1995, he’d bounced between the Orioles, Marlins, and Dodgers, putting up decent numbers and earning a World Series ring with Florida in 1997. It is believed Bonilla’s bat can bolster an outfield that struggled to produce the previous season. The dire state of the Met outfield is demonstrated amply by the fact that Todd Hundley was ever contemplated as a viable option in left.

Upon completing the deal with Los Angeles, Frank Cashen concedes Bonilla’s rocky past in New York but insists, “He’s matured since then.” Bonilla goes out of his way to prove Cashen wrong by uttering derogatory comments about Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda on his way out of Los Angeles. Called on to explain his remarks, Bonilla simultaneously apologizes to Lasorda and contends he was misquoted.

Once back in the driver’s seat, Phillips makes a move to shore up the outfield further while also strengthening the bullpen via a three-way deal with the Dodgers and Orioles. On December 1, the unhappy Todd Hundley goes to Los Angeles in exchange for outfielder Roger Cedeño. Once the jewel of the Dodger farm system, Cedeño fell out of favor with the team when his strikeouts ballooned at the major league level. The 24-year-old Venezuelan has tons of speed and raw ability, but the Dodgers’ haste to contend superseded Cedeño’s need for on-the-job training. The Mets are in Win Now mode as much as the Dodgers are, but they also have a desperate need for a fourth outfielder. They are taking a gamble that Cedeño might fill that void. If he proves better than a backup, all the better.

Catcher Charles Johnson, who comes to the Mets in the Cedeño deal, is then flipped to Baltimore for fireballing closer Armando Benítez. The righty’s blazing fastball and astronomic strikeout rates (87 K’s in only 68 ⅓ innings pitched in 1998) are assets any team would want for its relief corps. But such talent is available for a reason. Benítez has issues, immaturity chief among them. Off the field, he struggles with the same feelings of alienation and homesickness common among baseball players who hail from outside the States and must adjust to life in America and life in the big leagues all at once. His minor league pitching coach recalls having to talk the young man down from the ledge after each rough outing, begging him not to run back home to the Dominican Republic after every little struggle.

On the field, he triangulates between chest-thumping bravado, blackest despair, and unchecked anger, scarcely resting between any of these stops. His temper flares often, most infamously in a game at Yankee Stadium on May 19 of the previous season when he responded to the humiliation of giving up a homerun by drilling the following batter, Tino Martinez, in the back. Yankee broadcaster Jim Kaat, normally cool and bipartisan in the booth, seethed and called it “a real cheap shot.” Eager to pick a fight, Benítez stalked after Martinez as he took his base, then dropped his glove, ready to rumble. The pitcher got what he asked for when the entire Yankees bench and bullpen emptied, each player out for blood. Benítez was particularly roughed up by reliever Graeme Lloyd and slugger-in-winter Darryl Strawberry, each of whom landed several punches before the reliever somehow escaped with his life. He received little backup from his teammates, whose efforts to protect him were perfunctory at best. Once the punches started to fly, the Orioles jogged after the melee more as spectators than participants. Even as the brawl tumbled into their own dugout, Baltimore players did almost nothing to protect their closer.

Teammates were no more eager to defend Benítez after the fracas than they were during it. Baltimore manager Ray Miller went so far as to apologize to the Yankees, saying his closer “totally misrepresents the Baltimore Orioles’ tradition of good play and sportsmanship.” The Yankee Stadium debacle was the ugliest incident of his career, but it was far from his first on-field meltdown. He’d also allowed more than one crushing homer in the postseason that helped to kill the Orioles’ World Series dreams. Charles Johnson has some value as a glove-first catcher, but the Orioles are willing to accept any price if it means shipping Benítez far away from Baltimore.

Those who remember Armando Benítez’s one-man rumble in the Bronx view the acquisition with skepticism, but his new employers spin the pitcher’s pugnacious nature as a sign of “fire” and “fight.” Regarding the Yankee Stadium incident, Bobby Valentine reports, “Cal Ripken thought it was the most manly thing he’s ever seen a guy do.” When reporters perform their due diligence and inform Valentine that Cal Ripken denies ever saying such a thing, the manager utters a tight-lipped “no comment,” perhaps for the first time ever.

Though Benítez brings his issues to the Mets, he also brings a blazing fastball that makes their bullpen the one of the best in the majors. Phillips ensures it stays that way by getting two potential free agents to resign with the Mets: well-traveled southpaw Dennis Cook, who baffled hitters during the Marlins’ postseason run in 1997, and the eccentric righty Turk Wendell. In the grand tradition of quirky firemen, Wendell favors a shark-tooth necklace, slams a rosin bag to the ground before throwing his first pitch, and has a preoccupation with the number nine. Before inking his new contract, Turk makes sure all dollar amounts—base salary, incentives, bonuses—contain as many nines as possible.

Steve Phillips next turns his attentions to the lineup, which is a bit thin beyond the bats of Mike Piazza and John Olerud. Free agent sluggers Brian Jordan and B.J. Surhoff are the names linked to the Mets most often in offseason rumors, but when Jordan signs with the Braves, the team heads in an unexpected direction. The same day Armando Benítez and Roger Cedeño arrive in Queens, the Mets finalize a four-year deal with free agent third baseman Robin Ventura.

Ventura’s biggest claim to fame is ownership of the longest hitting streak in NCAA history, which he compiled for Oklahoma State. He manned the hot corner for the Chicago White Sox for nine seasons, collecting five Gold Gloves over that span. He is renowned as an RBI man and has showed an uncanny knack for hitting grand slams, belting nine during his years on the South Side. A gruesome ankle injury ruined his 1997 season, and though his stats the following year were respectable (21 homers and 91 RBIs), the White Sox feared the slight dip in production presaged an imminent decline. The Blue Jays thought the same thing of John Olerud before he came to New York, and it led to the most lopsided trade of Steve Phillips’ career. Perhaps lightning will strike twice.

As was the case with John Olerud, New York is not an obvious fit for Robin Ventura. During his years in Chicago, the Yankees and Mets were both reportedly on his no-trade list. Much like Olerud, Ventura is a quiet man who eschews the spotlight. He possesses a penchant for self-deprecating humor, an unusual trait for an athlete and a red flag to those who attempt to suss out which players are suited for Gotham and which players will be crushed under its weight. The California native hoped free agency would bring him to sunny San Diego, but the Padres are shedding payroll with brutal efficiency at the moment. The Dodgers and Angels are both spending like mad, but neither of them show any interest in the third baseman. The Orioles make an earnest play for Ventura’s services but want him to play first base instead of third until some indeterminate time in the future when Cal Ripken deigns to retire. Ventura declines this thankless task.

Faced with these non-options, Ventura chooses the Mets, though he needs some coaxing to warm to the idea of playing in New York even after signing. Good-will calls from Al Leiter and Dennis Cook, and a call Ventura places to Mike Piazza, ease his landing. Ventura even gets help from a non-Met, Padre legend Tony Gwynn, who compiles video of fearsome National League pitchers such as Curt Schilling and Kerry Wood that he will have to face for the first time this season. (Gwynn is a neighborly soul, but it also helps that he and Ventura share an agent.)

Ventura will play third base for the Mets, but his arrival will push someone else out of position. After a few seasons of shuffling between second and third in deference to more established players, Edgardo Alfonzo broke into the every day lineup as a third baseman in 1997. He and John Olerud gave the team stellar defense at the corners, and the stability had allowed his bat to come alive as well. Now, the Mets have acquired an All Star at his position. At first, the Ventura signing is assumed to be a prelude to trading Alfonzo in a deal for pitching, including a few whispers he will be the cornerstone of a package for Roger Clemens, who the cash-poor Blue Jays will be all but forced to deal this offseason. The Mets nip these rumors in the bud by announcing their intention to hold on to Alfonzo and move him back to second base.

Alfonzo agrees to switch positions without a word of protest, declaring he’s looking forward to being double play partners with shortstop Rey Ordoñez again, as he had been in the minor leagues and at times in the bigs. The Mets had banked on such a response. Steve Phillips later admits Alfonzo’s feeling on the positional move “wouldn’t have changed our mind one way or the other. We knew he’d play where we needed him to play.” He is the consummate team player, at times to his own detriment. During Venezuelan winter league action, when Alfonso should be logging time at what he calls his “new old position,” he remains at third base because his team has already penciled in a hotshot prospect from the Astros’ organization to play second. Far too polite to pull rank, Alfonzo takes workouts at second before and after games instead. If nothing else, these games will steel him for the Shea Stadium crowds that await in the regular season. The angry fervor of a New York fan is nothing compared to his compatriots in the Venezuelan stands. “Everything they have in their hand, they throw to you when you do something bad,” he reports.

Two weeks after Ventura hops on board, Phillips signs free agent outfielder and future Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson, the greatest base stealer and leadoff hitter of all time. Should anyone forget or dispute these contentions, Henderson is only too happy to remind you. In an age when offense is predicated on home runs and little else, Henderson remains a throwback to the speed-and-discipline days of the 1980s. In his third tour with the A’s in 1998, he led the American League in walks and stolen bases at the ripe old age of 39. His legs, bat, and mouth show no signs of slowing down. Right after his deal with the Mets becomes official, he declares, “I would say the Mets are going to be the best team in New York right now. The Yankees have been carrying the crown for a long time. It’s about time for the Mets to take over.” Henderson’s boast about his new team may be sincere, or it may just be a way to needle George Steinbrenner, with whom he’d clashed during his tumultuous years as a Yankee, back in the bad old days in the Bronx.

No good little team this. Steve Phillips has constructed a formidable squad, and an expensive one, that should compete in the National League. But the same was said of the rosters assembled prior to the gruesome 1992 and 1993 seasons, the ones that sped the team’s fall from grace. Fred Wilpon declares himself “completely confident” 1999 will not be a repeat of those disastrous years, though he won’t elaborate as to why he feels so sure of himself this time around. When asked of his expectations of the team, Wilpon says, “I think it’d be very disappointing if this team weren’t in the playoffs this year.”

Like everything Met ownership will say to the press this year, Wilpon’s declaration of expectations for the team is interpreted as a warning to Bobby Valentine. But the manager himself remains deaf to such alarms and pronounces himself as pleased as Wilpon about the moves Steve Phillips made in the offseason. “The rule in my career has been the wintertime has been a very frustrating time for me,” he tells reporters in December. “But this time, much has been done for our team.”

The window for this team to prove itself will be small, despite long-term deals for Al Leiter, Mike Piazza, and Robin Ventura—or rather, because of them. This Met roster is long in the tooth, and the flurry of free agent signings have cost them draft picks, slicing an already thin farm system even thinner. In the Times, Buster Olney (once on the Mets’ beat, now covering the Yankees) sees the Mets not as a team on the cusp of big things, but as a squad that stands an injury or two away from another high-priced disappointment. He notes the inconvenient fact that their planned starting outfield of Bobby Bonilla, Rickey Henderson, and Brian McRae “share 107 years of life experience and could be the worst defensive unit in the majors.” Comparing them unfavorably to the team he now covers, a team that spent its winter “adjusting a couple of lights on the Rockefeller Center tree...[t]he Mets are treading in place, their direction undefined once more, while the Yankees continue to churn in circles around them.”

Olney’s colleague at the Times, Harvey Araton, looks at the Mets and sees much the same thing. “In the ideal season, the Mets believe themselves capable of mounting a challenge to the Braves. In the more realistic setting, they are carrying the playoffs-now burden with a pitching staff that contains no dominant starters, questionable depth in the back end of the rotation and an aging, vulnerable closer. They could easily find themselves in another wild-card race, under more extreme pressure this time to win it.”

Araton points out the inconvenient fact that, for all the moves Phillips has made, only the Al Leiter deal addresses the Mets’ starting pitching. Heading into 1999, the Met rotation behind their ace lefty consists of soft-tossing righty Bobby Jones, control artist Rick Reed, the erratic Masato Yoshii, and Hideo Nomo, whose once baffling delivery grows more solvable with each pitch. Other possibilities include the oft-injured Jason Isringhausen, his equally bruised Generation K mate Paul Wilson, and another winter pickup, Allen Watson, a former high school phenom from the Mets’ home borough. Beyond these men are a series of question marks stretching off into the horizon.

The Mets are mentioned whenever a starter is said to be available via trade. Toronto’s Roger Clemens, Oakland’s Kenny Rogers, and Philadelphia’s Curt Schilling are deemed the biggest prizes and the most likely to be traded, pitchers with large contracts with struggling teams that are desperate to cut salary. To the New York press, it doesn’t matter that any hope of getting such a pitcher rests on top-level minor league talent the Mets don’t have. The media believes the Mets have spent too much money and piled up too many expectations already to go into the season with a rotation of Al Leiter And Friends. 

One possibility, however slim it might have been for the Mets, is taken off the table as teams are reporting to spring training. On February 18, after a long winter of wild speculation and clock watching, the Blue Jays trade Roger Clemens. Steve Phillips made a few stabs over the winter to acquire The Rocket, but the Mets’ lack of viable prospects and his unwillingness to part with Edgardo Alfonzo prevented talks from progressing beyond the what if… stage. 

Throughout the winter, smart money had Clemens returning to his home state of Texas, but both the Astros and Rangers are loath to trade away the top prospects Toronto coveted. While the Lone Star teams hems and haws, the Yankees swoop in and offer a package headed by lefty pitcher David Wells.

This move is seen by some as a salvo by the Yankees not only in the direction of their American League competition, but toward the Mets as well. The eyes of the New York sports world had been trained on the Mets all winter and would have remained so until opening day. Now, they will switch their focus to the sight of one of the best pitchers in the history of the game donning pinstripes. Sensing the implied dig, Nelson Doubleday tries to throw some cold water on the news. “I think you’ll have to look and see how Mr. Clemens passed his physical,” Doubleday tells reporters as he visits Port St. Lucie. “I think you’ll have to look and see how Mr. Clemens’s arm and shoulder are. That man has thrown a lot of pitches.” But Doubleday’s bitter diagnosis does not pan out. Clemens passes his physical, and the deal becomes official.

The Yankees didn’t trade for Roger Clemens for the sole purpose of poking a thumb in the Mets’ eye, since no team would need petty excuses to acquire a pitcher of his pedigree. The trade has this effect nonetheless. It blunts the buzz around the Mets’ own offseason acquisitions and settles newspaper accounts of the teams’ respective spring trainings into their familiar ruts: The Yankees in Tampa, solid professionals, preparing for title defense in quiet, dignified fashion. Brief cut to the Mets in Port St. Lucie, yapping puppy nipping at their heels.  

“I’m just glad the Mets aren’t in the AL East,” says Al Leiter upon hearing of the trade. When asked why the Yankees had dealt for one of the best pitchers in baseball, despite winning 125 games the year before, the former Yankee responds, “I think it’s just because George can.”

Beyond the Yankees and their fans, few are thrilled with the move. (That includes David Wells, who worshipped at the altar of Babe Ruth and wept upon learning he would no longer wear pinstripes.) There is something unseemly about the wealthy Yankees taking Clemens from the cash-strapped Blue Jays. They’d outbid teams for tons of players in recent years, but making this trade, after they’d enjoyed one of the most dominant seasons in baseball history, stirs up a strain of populist anger throughout the game. The Clemens trade underscores the feeling among baseball’s poorer teams that they are suffered to exist solely because the players they develop can someday feed the rich.

Sports Illustrated, in a piece that mildly criticizes the deal, points out the Twins have parted ways with their shortstop, Pat Meares, because they cannot afford to pay him $3.4 million, the same amount the Yankees spend on their backup catcher. Houston’s general manager Gerry Hunsicker grumbles, “That’s the most important message here: Regardless of who the Yankees want, they are in a position to outbid virtually any other franchise in the game.” Hunsicker may be angry at the Yankees for snatching up Clemens while he dithered, or angry with himself for an ill-timed outburst at baseball’s winter meetings, during which he accused Clemens of trying to “squeeze the last nickel out of the industry.” He may also be annoyed because at the same time he found out he lost the Clemens sweepstakes, he also lost one of the Astros’ best hitters, Moisés Alou, to a freak treadmill accident.

If there is any possible way for the Yankees to improve on their 1998 season, Clemens might provide it. There is, however, one piece of The Rocket’s résumé that remains lacking. Writers are quick to point out that, for all of Clemens’ dominance on the mound in the regular season, it has yet to translate to postseason success. He’d appeared in the playoffs with the Red Sox in four separate seasons and his results were checkered at best: nine starts and one lonely win to show for it. As Clemens leaves for New York, Toronto pitching coach Dave Stewart—a former hurler who won championships with the A’s and Blue Jays, and whose Oakland team twice eliminated Clemens’s Boston squad in the playoffs—has harsh words for him. “In my opinion, Roger hasn’t proved anything yet in a postseason. He hasn’t been in the postseason in a while and when he was, his teams weren’t that successful. Fact is fact.” Comparing his approach in the playoffs to Clemens’s, he says, “Maybe I was just egotistical, but I always felt that I could be and was the difference. Roger wanted to go someplace and be part of something already set.”

If you buy into Stewart’s take, then perhaps the Mets are better off without Clemens. Or perhaps this is all sour grapes, which would be inappropriate for spring training, the time of year when all teams should accentuate the positive. Resenting the Yankees becomes a less tenable stance once the news breaks that manager Joe Torre is suffering from prostate cancer and will take leave of the team to seek treatment. The team, and the game, suffer another loss when the legendary Joe DiMaggio passes away on March 8. The Clemens trade aside, the spring of 1999 proves a brutal one for the Yankees organization.

And so, the Mets get down to the usual springtime business of adopting a sunny attitude and exuding optimism for the upcoming season. Even Bobby Bonilla makes an effort to repair the bridges he’d burned with the press in the early 1990s. When asked how he will fare in the outfield now that age has reduced his speed, Bonilla quips, “There’s a good chance that if I’m under it, I’ll catch it.” When asked about what went wrong in his first stint with the Mets, he responds, “Which year?”

There are stories of Rickey Henderson working on his swing with Bonilla and vice versa. Of Edgardo Alfonzo relearning the double play rhythm he’d established with shortstop Rey Ordoñez in the minors. Of prospects like Jason Tyner, Mike Kinkade, and Juan LeBron and their hopes of going north with the big league club. Of Paul Wilson attempting to break into the rotation after several injury-wracked seasons. Of how Armando Benítez has no designs on the John Franco’s job as closer. Of how Franco feels no pressure from the young upstart. Of Turk Wendell’s long-suffering parents, who put up with the reliever’s wild youth. Of a brief team trip to play exhibition games in the Dominican Republic and the heroic reception accorded to several native sons on the Met roster. Of Rick Reed’s tearful reunion, during that trip, with a boy he’d once tried to adopt during his winter ball days. (The reunion is almost thwarted in slapstick fashion as Reed heads out to the boy’s hometown in the countryside at the same time as the boy, now grown up, races in the opposite direction to the Dominican capital.) Of the legendary hurler Sandy Koufax showing up in camp to give a few pointers to fellow lefty Al Leiter. Of another legend, Tom Seaver, throwing batting practice to wide-eyed Mets farmhands.

Clouds don’t emerge until March 19, when Bobby Bonilla is diagnosed with a partial ligament tear in his right knee, knocking him out of action for seven to ten days and endangering his status for opening day. It is not shocking news, considering Bonilla made three trips to the disabled list in 1998, but disappointing nonetheless for a player who wants to start his second trip with the Mets on the right foot. The injury is sustained during a spring training game after he collides with Montréal’s Dustin Hermanson as the Expo pitcher covers first base. The ailment will nag him well into the regular season, and as Bonilla struggles to recover, he vows “the next time, the pitcher’s going down….I’d rather knock him on his ass than go through what I’m going through now.”

Then, Paul Wilson, who had an outside shot at the fifth slot in the Met starting rotation before being sent to minor league camp (a move he says “ambushed” him with its suddenness), suffers a “significant and partial tear” of a ligament in his pitching elbow. Tommy John surgery will knock him out of action for all of 1999. Wilson’s fellow Generation K victim, Jason Isringhausen, tries out state-of-the-art digital technology that can superimpose other pitchers’ windups onto images of him, hoping this will allow him to identify his mechanical issues. Whatever help this may provide, it’s not enough to prevent Izzy from starting the year at triple-A.

The Mets are faced with a dearth of options to fill the back end of their rotation. Hideo Nomo struggles with his command and velocity all spring before earning his release on March 26, at which point an old nemesis is hired to take his place. At age 40, Orel Hershiser is not the dominating pitcher who terrorized the Mets in the 1988 playoffs. However, he can still grit his way through a game with guile and a sinker ball that results in a high number of grounders when working at its best. This could be a useful attribute when employed in front of an infield of the Mets’ caliber. So when Hershiser is released by the Indians at the tail end of spring training, the pitching-starved Mets scoop him up. Dispelling the fears of those who remember his role in derailing the Met dynasty of the 1980s, he professes to like New York, and even refers to “the ambiance of Shea Stadium” in a positive manner.

The Mets won’t expect Hershiser to be much this season beyond a warm body on the mound every five games, but they have higher expectation of the men who will precede him, expectations that are not bolstered much by their performances in Grapefruit League action. The team’s top three starters—Al Leiter, Rick Reed, and Bobby Jones—top out at mediocre in their spring starts. After them, the performances are even worse. Ostensible number four starter Masato Yoshii pitches to an ERA close to 10, but he will remain in the rotation because no other pitcher in camp performs well enough to take his place. That an aging former star like Hershiser is considered a viable solution suggests a serious problem, and once again rumors bubble up that the Mets will soon deal for a top-line starter. Kenny Rogers emerges as a trade possibility yet again, as do Jamie Moyer and Jeff Fassero of Seattle and Brad Radke of Minnesota. But it’s clear that such rumors are little more than wishful thinking. Such a trade would cost the Mets Edgardo Alfonzo and either Jason Isringhausen or Octavio Dotel, the team’s top pitching prospect who is deemed not yet ready for prime time. “I’m not all that hopeful for a trade before the end of spring training,” Phillips admits with less than a week until opening day, and his doubts prove true. No trades are made. The Mets will go to war with the pitchers they have and hope the addition of Robin Ventura and the shift of Alfonzo to second base will provide enough defense to compensate for the rotation’s deficiencies.

There’s little left for the Mets to do at this point but round out their 25-man roster. Youngsters and long shots slough off the list, headed for the minors and the sunset. With the aging legs of Rickey Henderson and Bobby Bonilla in mind, most of the bench spots go to outfielders like Jermaine Allensworth and Roger Cedeño. The versatile Mike Kinkade earns the last roster spot because he played every non-pitching position except center field during the spring, and Bobby Valentine is impressed with his ability to be a third-string catcher.

Young outfielder Melvin Mora turned heads by hitting .421 during Grapefruit League action, but he will start the year in triple-A. With so many expectations going into the season, the Mets don’t want to take chances with unknown commodities. Kinkade has two major league at bats, while Mora has none. Of such slim margins are these decisions made.

Tough choices are a manager’s lot this time of year, but Valentine compounds the difficulty by committing the same sin Joe Torre once committed against him: he fails to tell Mora of his fate until the last possible moment. In light of his spring training stats, Mora assumes he’ll make the trip north. His bags are on the truck bound for Shea Stadium, along with the other major leaguers’ gear, when Valentine breaks the bad news.

“I know you want to punch me,” Valentine tells him. The news hits Mora so hard he contemplates jumping off a bridge. His only recourse is that of any other jilted big league hopeful: Wait for the crush of disappointment to fade into a dull throb, then vow to make his name known before the year is out.

Next Chapter: Chapter 2: Si No Gana, Empata