In the 2012 movie Trouble with the Curve, Clint Eastwood played Gus Lobel, a worn-out, grizzled baseball scout at the end of his career, bouncing from sandlot to sandlot looking for the next hotshot arm. Gus is as far from Sandy Alderson, the general manager of the New York Mets, as one can get and still be in the ballpark. In Baseball Maverick, Steve Kettmann--former San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter and ghostwriter of Jose Canseco's autobiography, Juiced--describes Alderson's build-from-the-farm approach as a "tightly run, analytically efficient, organized system for developing minor-league talent." A Vietnam Marine vet and lawyer from Harvard, Alderson was hired in 1981 by the Oakland A's when the Haas family bought the team and wanted a more businesslike approach to running the franchise.
Alderson transformed the lowly A's into a powerhouse of the '80s and '90s as he mentored his successor Billy Beane to be the sabermetric miracle man made famous in Moneyball. For nearly half his book, Kettmann explores whether that same low-key, analytical, business-focused approach can work in the biggest baseball market in the world with a Mets team that began as a laughingstock in 1962, had several superlative years (1969 and 1986) but had many more miserable seasons and September collapses. Now, with "a critical mass of talent," 2015 is the do-or-die season for Alderson and the Mets: "It's a car with some power under the hood: it's time to do some driving." Baseball Maverick is not so much about Sandy Alderson as it is a savvy story about the business side of baseball--a side that sometimes seems to be doing all the driving. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.