THE NEW METS


FRED AND JEFF WILPON HELD their secret rendezvous with Omar Minaya in a conference room at a small airport west of downtown Montreal the morning of September 27, 2004, staying in Canada no longer than the three hours required to conclude their mission.

Three days earlier, a beaten-down Mets ownership had been distraught about the previous week’s leak of its decision to fire manager Art Howe at season’s end, a PR fiasco that lingered through four tabloid back pages. So, the Wilpons phoned the Montreal Expos GM, declaring their intent to bring him back to Flushing. And on that final Monday of the 2004 season, and of the soon-to-be-relocated Expos’ existence, Minaya discreetly accepted, initiating a chain of events that ultimately would bring about The New Mets Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran. Only then, Minaya wasn’t thinking about the free-agent bonanzas he’d finally have the financing to pursue, after frugally working in Montreal; nor was he thinking about building the organization for which teenagers throughout Latin America would aspire to play. Instead, Minaya sought only to keep his acceptance quiet. He headed to Olympic Stadium for that night’s Expos–Florida Marlins game, played before a crowd of 3,923, and stayed secluded in his office, trying to maintain a low profile despite the media spotlight as Montreal prepared to bid adieu to its Major League Baseball franchise. Only Expos president Tony Tavares, assistant GM Tony Siegle, Minaya’s family, and soon, the commissioner’s office would be made aware of what had occurred, in addition to incumbent Mets GM Jim Duquette.

“It was kept very private,” Minaya said. “And it happened very quickly, too—within seventy-two hours.”

Fred Wilpon had tried to rehire Minaya the previous winter in an awkward arrangement with Duquette that left unclear who would have final say, but the principal owner ultimately just shed the “interim” from Duquette’s GM title when Minaya balked. Minaya wasn’t enamored with the idea of power-sharing in Flushing this time, either, even if MLB officials were making his job difficult in Montreal. After going so far as to prevent any minor-league call-ups when rosters expanded in September 2003—because each player would receive $50,000 for the service time, a bill footed by the other twenty-nine clubs that technically owned the Expos—MLB again forced Minaya’s players to split the season between Montreal and San Juan in ’04. A clubhouse vote against a divided home schedule had been ignored.

When Fred Wilpon unexpectedly pursued Minaya again, the principal owner this time didn’t let Minaya’s desire for control undermine the recruiting.

“I’m coming to talk to you,” Wilpon stated matter-of-factly.

“About what?” Minaya asked.

“About the general manager’s job,” Wilpon said.

“Well, what about Jim?” Minaya replied.

“I want you to run my baseball operations.”

“Who’s going to have full authority?”

“I want you to have full authority.”

“Full authority of baseball operations?” Minaya asked, just to make sure.

“Full authority of baseball operations,” Wilpon said.

“Well, let’s sit down and talk.”

Duquette was a loyal employee who had succeeded the fired Steve Phillips as general manager on an interim basis, two days after Jose Reyes’s promotion in July 2003. He had a three-year contract awarded that winter and had been briefed about the possibility of Minaya returning even before the Wilpons’ jet took off for Montreal—although he had been led to believe it would be similar to the previously proposed power-sharing arrangement. The sobering news—that Minaya would be fully in charge—came over dinner in Greenwich, Connecticut, the night the Wilpons returned from Montreal, which happened to be Fred and Judy’s forty-sixth wedding anniversary.

Quietly included in Duquette’s contract, in the fine print he never really digested, was a stipulation that his GM title and salary could be slashed after one season. The language had been inserted for one overriding reason: The Wilpons had always revered Minaya, who had worked for five years alongside Duquette in Flushing, under Phillips. The fact that Duquette’s $450,000 annual salary remained untouched despite the demotion, and his title elevated to senior vice president of baseball operations, served as little consolation.

“Fred made a point of saying how important it was for him to address this with me and how much he wanted for me to stay,” Duquette said. “He was stressing the point by saying, ‘This is my anniversary. Instead of being home where I should be with my wife, I’m here talking this through with you.’ In terms of Omar being the general manager—that was blindsiding, and caught me by surprise, because that wasn’t what we had talked about the week before. As I said at the dinner, he’s the owner. He has a right to change his mind.”

There was a terrible reason for Duquette’s ability to put the demotion into perspective. The week before his dinner with Fred Wilpon, Duquette’s two-year-old daughter Lindsey had been admitted to The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore with a rare kidney disease, one that would keep her hospitalized for nine weeks, nearly to Thanksgiving, before it thankfully had a happy resolution. Duquette’s father Jim, who had taught philosophy in Massachusetts, had often told him to find the silver lining in tough times. Duquette remembered that advice as he left Shea Stadium each day at 6 p.m. during the ordeal, bringing dinner to his family at the hospital, where he would remain for three hours. One mother the Duquettes met at Montefiore had lost three children to a rare genetic disorder, and the fourth—who had the same birthday as Lindsey—tragically was afflicted, too.

“I couldn’t have done both jobs—be the general manager of the Mets and make sure my daughter was okay,” said Duquette, who arranged for Mets players to stop by Montefiore during their winter charity tour in January 2005 in appreciation of the hospital’s care. “It took up way too much time. In hindsight, there have been many times when [I’ve felt] someone was looking down on me.”

Duquette dutifully stood by his successor’s side at the Thursday news conference that celebrated Minaya’s return, held in the old Jets locker room at Shea Stadium.

Minaya, the game’s lone Hispanic GM, had used the phrase full authority in his phone conversation with Fred Wilpon to describe a power structure that would clearly delineate how honest disagreements with Duquette would be resolved. But when Minaya used this phrase at the media gathering, on an off-day before a season-ending series coincidentally against the Expos, full authority took on a different meaning. It was widely misinterpreted as freedom from ownership’s purported over-involvement in baseball decisions. This included the excessive meetings and meddling after soliciting input from veterans (including Al Leiter and John Franco) that became widely accepted as gospel among suits around the game, no matter what the legitimacy; industry talk that caused established executives such as Houston’s Gerry Hunsicker and Seattle’s Pat Gillick to steer clear of the place.

What preceded Minaya’s arrival, and swallowed Duquette, were a series of incidents, some too unbelievable to make up and most beyond his control. The dysfunction predated Duquette’s ascension and ranged from Phillips’s poisonous relationship with 2000 Subway Series manager Bobby Valentine to a college-age photo of reliever Grant Roberts with a bong plastered on the cover of Newsday; from Valentine’s mimicking of a drugged-up batter at a news conference to address the situation, and claims Roberts was being extorted by a Long Island woman, to Mike Piazza’s declaration he was heterosexual, which actually trumped terrorists eyeing the Brooklyn Bridge for attention on one tabloid front page. One incident even involved Duquette’s newly hired superscout Bill Singer verbally assaulting Los Angeles Dodgers executive Kim Ng with mock-Chinese gibberish at the GM Meetings in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The distractions reached the critical stage under Duquette’s watch with fan uproar over the trade of top pitching prospect Scott Kazmir, a twenty-year-old left-hander who threw in the upper-90s, to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays for Victor Zambrano, balky elbow and all. This swap devolved into finger-pointing, including the leak of pitching coach Rick Peterson’s comments on an internal conference call that he could fix Zambrano “in ten minutes.” (Peterson vehemently maintained the declaration was understood by team brass to be an expression of confidence that he could help the control-challenged pitcher—not as a literal claim about the time frame.) The final blow to Duquette’s tenure came when the Daily News ran a headline on the back page that read ‘Yer out! Howe a goner when season ends,’ revealing that Fred Wilpon, the lone holdout, had been persuaded at a supposedly hush-hush meeting to dump the manager after the 2004 season, eating half of a four-year, $9.4 million contract. Howe, given the option two days after the initial story appeared to either remain through season’s end or depart right away, decided to complete the campaign as a lame duck, an uncomfortable position for a gentleman despite any managerial shortcomings.

“I remember following that and saying, ‘Man, that sounds like it’s all screwed up.’ It looked all out of whack,” Minaya said. “From the outside, it looked somewhat dysfunctional. There were a lot of people commenting on trade talks. I know Jim, and I’ve always liked Jim. I felt there wasn’t a spokesman. It seemed like everyone was all over the place. And then, even that Art Howe thing . . . You’re fired, but you’re staying on as an interim? I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Still, at the time of his anointment, Minaya maintains he never had grand visions of an extreme winter makeover that included Pedro and Beltran in Mets uniforms or of the premier free agents allowing the Mets to attempt to become the dominant brand in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela and Puerto Rico. He could not foresee the team’s logo splashed all over Manoguayabo, Pedro’s hometown, where the World Series champion Red Sox insignia could be found everywhere, including the bodega. Duquette had already done significant groundwork, negotiating contracts with the representatives for Kris Benson and Leiter, and Minaya assumed that the rotation would be set with those two pitchers, plus Tom Glavine, Steve Trachsel, and Zambrano.

Familiar enough with the team because he had been a general manager in the same division—and not all that far removed from assistant GM duties in Flushing—Minaya knew the organization desperately needed a power hitter, ideally at first base, given Piazza’s failed conversion to the position. Minaya eventually concluded he would target Carlos Delgado, the free agent who had gained notoriety as a Blue Jay for declining to stand for the singing of “God Bless America.” The slugger had a strong commitment against standing for the song based on his opposition to the U.S. Navy’s one-time bombing practices in Vieques, an island off the coast of his native Puerto Rico, and subsequent military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Delgado was willing to shelve that behavior to abide by any team’s guidelines, even if no one knew exactly how his past practices would play in New York, hardest hit by the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

The GM preferred the lefty-hitting Delgado to Troy Glaus, whom he also liked, and the other available bat at first base, Richie Sexson, fearing those players would make an already righty-dominated lineup too weighted to that side of the plate. Minaya also seriously considered pursuing free agent J.D. Drew for right field, not even considering Beltran, since the Mets had two-time Gold Glove winner Mike Cameron to play centerfield, with two years remaining on his contract. In fact, when Scott Boras presented Minaya with one of the agent’s infamous books projecting Beltran’s future production at the November GM Meetings in Key Biscayne, Florida, Minaya never opened it. Among the items in the statistics-laden manifesto: the eight home runs that Beltran slugged in the 2004 postseason with the Houston Astros tied Barry Bonds’s major-league record; and the fact that Beltran and Ty Cobb were the only two centerfielders ever to have twice recorded 100 RBI, 100 runs, and 40 steals in a season. (While perusing the tome seemed like a waste of time to Minaya, by the end of the Mets’ courtship of Beltran, Fred Wilpon had devoured it three times.)

Al Leiter had become a lightning rod for strong emotions among the Shea faithful. On the one hand, he was the Bruce Springsteen–loving New Jersey product who had an All-Star season in 2000 when the Mets met the Yankees in the Subway Series. On the other hand, he was an aspiring Republican politician, seemingly honing the skills that might one day serve him well in Washington, D.C., by acting as clubhouse lawyer, even if he denied it. Close with Jeff Wilpon? Sure, Leiter would agree with that—just as he had been close to Marlins owner/golfing buddy H. Wayne Huizenga during his first stint in South Florida. Nothing sinister about that. And shame on those who relied on Leiter’s opinion, not the man himself, if he happened to share his solicited thoughts in casual conversations about the state of the team while speaking as friends with higher-ups. So what if Leiter did express displeasure that Kazmir changed the music to Eminem in a workout room at the Port St. Lucie, Florida, spring-training complex in 2004? Was it really Leiter’s fault if that somehow contributed to Kazmir being painted as a wild child—one of the numerous factors that might have led to the flame-throwing first-round pick’s departure? On the field, Leiter went 10–8 with a 3.21 ERA in ’04, but his outings averaged only five and two-thirds innings, taxing the bullpen. Yet the Mets organization had been loyal to a fault under the Wilpons, having annually handed John Franco—their aging captain and a Brooklyn native, whose father had been a New York City sanitation worker—one-year extensions at above-market value, even if this time Franco had been informed in August that another contract wouldn’t be forthcoming.

Leiter opened the window that allowed Minaya to push him out wider and wider and wider, in fact. Three times he missed deadlines to accept contract proposals, the final offer for a guaranteed $4 million, with the chance to double that amount based on incentives, half easily attainable. Randy and Alan Hendricks, Leiter’s agents, agreed with Minaya at the third deadline that both sides would explore other options. The next day—a Saturday, at 10 a.m.—the agents left a voice mail saying Leiter would accept the terms. It was too late. After the weekend, Minaya called back to reiterate he was now looking elsewhere.

“For a guy supposedly running the organization, who had the owner’s ear and the general manager’s ear, where were those ears in the end?” a bitter Leiter noted to Lee Jenkins of the New York Times. Leiter had just signed a one-year contract with the Marlins for $8 million, of which $3 million was deferred without interest and another $1 million went directly to charity. This marriage would end badly in July, when Leiter was handed to the Yankees, who had to assume only $250,000 of the contract.

“Full authority of baseball operations?” Minaya had asked during the September phone call with Fred Wilpon.

“Full authority of baseball operations,” the principal owner had promised, a pledge met with skepticism by the media at the time. The promise now appeared genuine as Minaya unloaded the clubhouse stalwarts—from Leiter and Franco to Mike Stanton and Vance Wilson and Jason Phillips, to even universally liked Joe McEwing by spring training’s end—turnover that led to whispers of Minaya building Los Mets when coupled with the Hispanic ethnicity of many of the new additions.

The Dominican-born Minaya was free to dream big as he sat at his desk in his second-floor office at Shea Stadium. His storybook path had taken him from the streets of Corona, Queens, to the GM chair only miles away, and even to separate meals with President George W. Bush and Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernández Reyna during the 2004–05 off-season. Minaya had been ignoring calls from Fernando Cuza, the agent for Pedro, believing that no room existed in the rotation. Now he gave different instructions to new special assistant Tony Bernazard, a well-connected former major-league second baseman of ten seasons. Minaya had hired Bernazard away from the Players Association, where his responsibilities during a thirteen-year stint had included developing a World Cup–style baseball tournament that would be named the World Baseball Classic. Minaya asked Bernazard to inform Cuza that, in fact, the Mets were interested in the ace. Minaya reasoned that if Leiter would cost the organization $8 million in ’05, there was little harm in boosting that sum to $11 million for Pedro, whom Minaya figured would only command a three-year deal. If Pedro rejected the overture—and initial suspicions were he would, since he was coming off of a historic World Series title with the Boston Red Sox—well, no worries. Minaya was prepared to sign Odalis Perez, another Cuza client, or trade for Anaheim’s Ramon Ortiz.

“I thought it was a long shot,” Minaya said. “Why would a guy who won a World Series, who’s The Guy in town—everything is there—why would he want to come to a last-place team, a tough town, not a great hitting team? Why?”

Eventually, Minaya came to think that maybe the proud Pedro wasn’t being treated as The Guy anymore; that Curt Schilling and his Cooperstown-bound bloody sock may forever have trumped Pedro in Red Sox lore after Boston’s first championship in eighty-six years. Those still in the Mets’ front office from the 2002–03 winter were reminded of how the organization had landed Tom Glavine after a messy breakup with the Atlanta Braves, despite similar initial pessimism. “I said to myself, my thinking was, ‘Schilling is The Guy. And I don’t care what Schilling does; Pedro is still Pedro.’ I think Pedro needed a new challenge,” Minaya said. “Fernando Cuza, we have a good relationship. And the fact that we have Tony Bernazard, that helps a lot. Tony had dealt with Pedro many times. I just felt this was not going to be about money for Pedro. This was going to be about a new challenge and about trust. I felt we could provide him the new challenge if he trusted that we were going to go after the players.”

To that point, Mets brass had struck out on the free-agent market, even while trying to bulk up the bench. Their credibility was minimal, considering the lack of appeal of the organization after three straight losing seasons, including two last-place finishes, plus the obstacles of a drab ballpark, intense media scrutiny, and unforgiving fans with a lust for booing. Despite higher bids by the Mets, catcher Henry Blanco accepted a two-year, $2.7 million offer from the Chicago Cubs, and infielder Craig Counsell accepted a two-year, $3.1 million offer from the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Pedro’s recruitment, which began with Bernazard’s call to Cuza, quickly led to Minaya sharing Thanksgiving lunch with the ace at a Santo Domingo restaurant three days after the GM had rejected the Hendrickses’ weekend voice mail. During the face-to-face pitch, Minaya’s preferred mode of operation (though he especially likes to get into the players’ homes), Minaya labeled them both Davids in a David versus Goliath tale. Pedro was a World Series champion after growing up without the fifty cents necessary to take the bus, while huddled under that now-famous mango tree; and the Dominican-born GM was running a New York baseball franchise after growing up on the streets of Corona, Queens.

“We were talking about spiritual things, and we talked about David,” Minaya said. “Pedro’s very spiritual. We talked about the underdog spirit.”

The Red Sox hierarchy—owner John W. Henry and CEO Larry Lucchino—countered Minaya’s pursuit by meeting Pedro and Cuza outdoors at the airport in Santo Domingo. They carried with them the World Series trophy, inviting Pedro and his family to pose for photographs with it. In the end, the Sox—whose Bill James–inspired, Moneyball-style number crunchers didn’t value Pedro as greatly as Minaya did—would guarantee the final season of a three-year, $40.5 million bid. The foot-dragging had turned off Pedro, even if Sox teammate David Ortiz, after Henry and Lucchino’s airport visit, confidently proclaimed, “He ain’t going to no Mets.”

The courtship reached its climax at the December 10–13 winter meetings at the Anaheim Marriott, down the block from Disneyland. Mets and Red Sox brass had suites on the same floor of one tower of the hotel. They had been engaged in simultaneous and serious discussions about sending World Series MVP Manny Ramirez from Boston to Flushing, a salary addition that would prevent the Mets from continuing to pursue Pedro. The Mets decided pitching was the priority and broke off talks with the Red Sox, citing an unbridgeable money gap, which angered Boston officials.

The next day, the Mets all but sealed Pedro.

As Mets brass was closing the deal, Red Sox officials were furiously trying to reach Cuza, making repeated phone calls. The Mets knew it wasn’t an agent prank to create a false sense of urgency or pressure, either. Cuza showed them his cell phone, where the all-too-familiar 617 area code kept popping up. Not only that, but the Red Sox also sent over a counterproposal, slipped under the door of the agent’s hotel room just as Mets executives were shaking hands with Cuza. At the time, the Red Sox publicly claimed to be out of the bidding.

Lesser issues still needed to be resolved, like the luxury-suite provision at Shea Stadium, which required a phone call from Mets brass to Jeff Wilpon in New York. Minaya, Duquette, and the rest of the brain trust planned to leave Cuza’s room to make the call, but the agent suggested he walk into the hallway instead and let them phone from his room. Bernazard, a veteran of several Major League Baseball versus Players Association negotiations, kept checking through the peephole to ensure no one from Cuza’s side was eavesdropping, apparently a dirty trick he had encountered during labor talks. The agent acted professionally.

Cuza called his client that night and told Pedro he could close the deal with the Mets with the ace’s consent, if he was willing to leave the Red Sox. This was a moment of truth that caused Pedro—as composed as any pitcher on the mound—to experience shortness of breath as he spoke from his backyard in the Dominican Republic. Inside his compound—which includes ten-foot-high yellow walls with razor wire on top, big green double doors at the main entrance, and a man with a shotgun standing guard—Pedro prayed, asking God why the Mets had seemed to show more interest.

The next morning the Mets learned they had an agreement in principle, though they didn’t tip their hands as they marched poker-faced through a Marriott side lobby. They departed the winter meetings in a pair of white vans bound for the airport and a cross-country flight on discount carrier JetBlue—an ironic choice of carrier considering their winter spending spree, which included a three-year, $22.5 million contract to Benson. That deal had caused Pittsburgh Pirates managing general partner Kevin McClatchy to rail at the bar being set for starting pitchers—and mediocre ones at that, in McClatchy’s biased opinion, having previously employed Benson. No one from the Mets cared. Pedro had agreed to a four-year, $53 million contract, pending an MRI in New York.

“We high-fived, hugged, whatever, because we were all excited,” Duquette said. “But it was all contingent upon the physical. You heard all these whispers, ‘Well, he’s got a tear’ or whatever. Obviously, we were a little concerned.”

The Mets held dual news conferences, one at the Diamond Club at Shea Stadium, the other in Santo Domingo. This was a signal of their enhanced international appeal, and something they would mimic once Beltran chose the Mets a month later, when announcements were held in New York and San Juan. (To add to the circus atmosphere, the Post sent a four-foot-tall actor named Tim Loomis to Pedro’s Flushing media gathering. This stunt was spawned because Pedro had a twenty-eight-inch-tall good-luck charm named Nelson de la Rosa, who had gained notoriety during Boston’s World Series run—even to the extent of riding on the championship float with Pedro. “I’m more famous than he is,” Loomis told Page Six shortly after de la Rosa revealed in the Daily News that he had become estranged from Pedro. “I was in Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog. I’ve worked at Radio City’s Christmas show. I’ve appeared on Saturday Night Live. And I’m doing the hottest comedy show in the country—Beacher’s Comedy Madhouse at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. I’m also a lot taller than him.”)

Critics had decried how the Mets could hand a pitcher with a supposedly balky shoulder such a lengthy contract. Meanwhile, what failed to be revealed at the time was that the Cardinals had already moved to four years and $50 million with their offer before the Mets ever guaranteed the ’08 season.

Regardless, Minaya knew Pedro was exactly the jolt the organization needed, his production in the fourth year of the contract be damned. Pedro would give the Mets an instant swagger, the credibility that would ease the task of attracting others, including the role players who would eventually give the Mets one of the strongest benches in baseball during the 2005 season, with Miguel Cairo, Chris Woodward, Marlon Anderson, and Ramon Castro. The signing would give the Mets visibility in Latin America, where Minaya had begun his career as a scout with the Texas Rangers—signing the likes of Sammy Sosa and Juan Gonzalez—and where the GM knew the Mets would benefit for years, even after Pedro’s contract expired. This strategy bore its first major fruit that July, when sixteen-year-old Dominican outfielder Jesus Fernando Martinez signed a $1.4 million contract with the Mets despite higher offers elsewhere. The young slugger cited his affinity for Pedro among the major factors in picking the Mets.

“I was a millionaire since I was twenty-four years old, first of all, to let you know,” said Pedro, indicating trust and respect were major criteria, as Minaya had hoped. “When I got to Boston, I was already making millions. I continued to live up to my contract in Boston. So you didn’t pick up a bum from the street. Boston wouldn’t pull the trigger. I went beyond my efforts to give Boston every opportunity to keep me. Why did they have to wait until the last minute or so? Do I have to sit and wait for someone else to decide what my future is going to be?”

The winter meetings placed the new Mets brass on a stage, even if up to that point their lone roster moves had been re-signing reliever Mike DeJean, cutting loose outfielder Richard Hidalgo and reliever Ricky Bottalico, and shipping Stanton to the Yankees for fellow southpaw Felix Heredia, a move that saved the organization $1 million. This cleared salary room to afford Cairo, but was otherwise a bust for both teams, with Stanton later released and Heredia’s season quickly over because of hand numbness and coldness caused by an aneurysm.

Willie Randolph, whose rise paralleled Minaya’s (although in Brooklyn rather than Queens), had been hired in November to succeed Howe as manager. This happened despite late and insincere flirtations with Jim Leyland and ex-’86 Met Wally Backman, who lasted all of four days as Arizona Diamondbacks manager because of revelations of a DUI conviction and guilty plea to a misdemeanor harassment charge. Randolph, fifty, grew up in the Brownsville section of the borough, playing punchball, stickball, and stoopball, and starring at Tilden High School. During his first legitimate date, with his childhood-sweetheart-turned-wife Gretchen, he watched the Cubs’ Billy Williams slug two homers at Shea Stadium. He rooted for the ’69 Mets. And though Randolph played thirteen seasons in Yankee pinstripes, he finished his career with the Mets in 1992. Randolph had not played the final seven weeks of that season because of a broken hand, but manager Jeff Torborg, who had coached Randolph for years in the Bronx, placed him in the lineup on the season’s final day. Appropriately enough, since Randolph had 1,243 in his career, his final plate appearance resulted in a walk.

“In this town, whether you’re a Yankee or a Met, I think people look at me as one of their own, as a New Yorker,” Randolph said.

Seated with the team’s beat writers at the annual managers’ luncheon at the winter meetings, Randolph proved charming and personable and nothing like the introverted Howe. This was true, even though Randolph generated his first unplanned headline—however harmless—when he revealed he had yet to speak with Piazza since taking the job a month earlier, his one call to the slugger having gone unreturned. The kicker: The previous night, Piazza had appeared on a New Jersey rock station, taking calls from the public.

Not everything went smoothly in Anaheim. Early on, Minaya had identified Delgado as the bat the Mets needed, but their face-to-face meeting in agent David Sloane’s room at the Sheraton five minutes away turned decidedly sour, even though Minaya tried to hold it together. With a Dominican–born GM, the Puerto Rican–born Bernazard beside him as special assistant, New York’s first African-American manager in Randolph, and a coaching staff that included three minorities—Manny Acta, Sandy Alomar Sr., and Jerry Manuel—the Mets had become a model for staff diversity. Delgado, a Puerto Rican, failed to be impressed, believing the Mets were trying to use Bernazard to play some sort of race card.

When Mets brass showed up at the agent’s room with an entourage that included Minaya, Duquette, Bernazard, Randolph, and Peterson, Delgado was immediately turned off. The computer-savvy, leather-jacket-wearing Sloane felt the assembly of Mets execs resembled a Rockettes line. Minaya waited until last to introduce Bernazard. Delgado, feeling he was being played because of their shared Puerto Rican heritage, blurted, “The highest-paid translator on the planet,” seemingly a reference to Bernazard’s days with the Players Association, when his role partly included communicating with Hispanic ballplayers. Minaya tried to disarm the awkward moment with a laugh, but the Mets never got close to signing Delgado, despite the Marlins’ winning bid—four years, $52 million—being $30,000 less in present value than the Mets’ offer, using Sloane’s own calculations. Florida also lacked the no-trade protection the Mets offered. The deal did put the slugger close to his agent’s South Florida home, which Sloane maintained was a non-factor.

The night Delgado picked the Marlins in late January, fifteen days after Beltran had been introduced in Flushing, the Mets traded Class A prospect Ian Bladergroen to the Red Sox for first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz. This seemed like a sound alternative considering his slick fielding, something particularly useful for young infielders David Wright, Jose Reyes, and Kazuo Matsui, who were traumatized by sloppy first-base play the previous season.

Sloane went on to needle the organization into spring training by sending out mass e-mails to the media—some with his own commentary, others with links to articles in which Delgado had been critical of the Mets. One piece even outed Leiter as a co-conspirator by badmouthing his former organization during a Marlins recruiting luncheon.

In a spring-training column appearing in the Toronto Sun, in which Sloane delivered a blow-by-blow account of his off-season dealings on Delgado’s behalf, Leiter is alleged to have said: Who better to discourage him from going to New York? . . . In New York you have seven or eight competing papers, TV networks and their affiliates and peripheral periodicals. It’s fine when you are dealing and kicking butt. It just chip, chip, chip, chips away at your resolve, cracking away your protective toughness. Every bad game, it’s like, “Are you worried?” The manager says this . . . “Are you worried?” You begin to doubt yourself. That’s why slumps in New York are so elongated. Then, the guys on [talk radio] get on you, move it up another notch, and everyone driving to the game listens. You get to the park and your home fans are booing you, and after the game you say something stupid.

Leiter distanced himself from the remarks, issuing a borderline denial, though Steve Trachsel—his former Mets teammate—agreed it certainly sounded like something Leiter would say. Sloane also belittled the Mets, predicting Beltran’s signing would have little impact on the Mets’ chances in the National League East. “We thought that without Carlos [Beltran], the Mets were a fourth-place club, and we thought that with Carlos, they were still a fourth-place club,” Sloane said.

The Toronto Star ran a column distributed by Sloane that read: “GM Omar Minaya and his assistant Tony Bernazard . . . misplayed the race card. They approached Delgado as a fellow Latino, instead of, first, as a man. Mistake.”

The agent maintained even months later that he was merely fulfilling a pledge to reporters to keep them informed about developments, not seeking retribution for anything. What the Mets could never understand about what seemed like a cyber-attack by the agent was that Sloane had been the one at the winter meetings to ask for the entire process to remain quiet, a proposal to which the Mets had readily agreed. Mets brass continued to assert during the season that the Marlins’ recruiting party—which included owner Jeffrey Loria, president David Samson, general manager Larry Beinfest, assistant GM Michael Hill, vice president Andre Dawson, and special assistant Tony Perez—which met during a luncheon at Joe’s Stone Crab in South Florida, was far larger than the Mets’ contingent at the Sheraton in Anaheim that had so irritated Delgado. With Delgado’s negotiations having turned sour, Beltran became a more realistic option. The Wilpons had pushed Duquette to cut the payroll by $36 million in his one winter as GM, resulting in a haul of closer Braden Looper, Cameron, and Matsui. The Wilpons now seemed receptive to spending, understanding that new energy was needed among the fan base before the launch of the Mets’ new television network in 2006. They also knew that season-ticket sales were eroding, and the next winter’s free-agent class was not nearly as attractive. Still, the organization had not exactly had a positive relationship with Beltran’s agent, Scott Boras, dating back to ill-fated dealings over Alex Rodriguez.

Any hostility with Boras had started to thaw in June 2004, when the Mets took a Boras client, right-handed pitcher Matt Durkin from San Jose State, in the second round of the draft. Then came the ultimate olive branch, or more accurately, a shrewd business move, when Boras sent a message to Minaya and Bernazard saying the Pedro signing impressed Beltran.

“Let’s forget about the past,” Minaya replied. “You know me. I know you. If I’m going to get into the process, I’m going to get into the process to win.”

Bernazard had played against Boras when they were minor-leaguers. And Beltran’s mother had twice called Bernazard at the Players Association before her son was drafted in 1995, seeking advice about agents.

“When I go after something, I go after something,” Bernazard said.

Relentless pursuit proved to be an understatement. Minaya or Bernazard—“the unsung hero,” Jeff Wilpon called the special assistant—phoned Boras for thirty-one straight days, a fact the agent could verify because he logs all his calls in a book. A meeting between owner Fred Wilpon and Beltran was finally set for January 3 in San Juan. Boras had wanted the sides to meet in Florida, as Beltran had done with the Astros and Yankees. Minaya insisted otherwise, figuring he could get to Beltran’s heart by getting into his living room, though he had to settle for the Ritz-Carlton on the island, minus Beltran’s wife Jessica, an absence that concerned Mets brass.

“We knew they were close and that she was going to be a big part of the decision-making process,” Duquette said. “We thought it was bad news that she wasn’t there. I think she was sick. But we were really hoping she would be there. We even considered going back down there so we could meet with Carlos and Jessica. It never ended up working out.”

Still, Beltran came away impressed with the owner’s genuineness and fatherly advice, despite a four-decade age gap and their disparate pasts. Wilpon had played high school baseball alongside Sandy Koufax in New York City, while Beltran revered contemporary centerfielders such as the Yankees’ Bernie Williams, a fellow Puerto Rican. What struck Beltran most was that Wilpon wasn’t selling against anyone, including the Yankees. His pitch dealt with the virtues of playing in New York, of the list of Hall of Fame centerfielders who had patrolled Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium—Duke Snider and Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle.

“He was saying if you wanted to play for a big-market team, New York was the right place to be—Mets or Yankees,” Beltran said. “That was something as an owner you don’t see happen. You don’t see a guy going to Puerto Rico to recruit me and at the same time he’s giving me options to go to different places. That sounds funny. But at the same time, that was what he was doing, and that’s why I’m here.”

Said Duquette: “Fred talked about how Carlos had to do what’s best for him no matter what it is. It was classic Fred Wilpon discussing this. He’s confident that this is the place, but he’s not going to do it at all costs trying to convince him. He treated him like an adult. ‘Hey, you’ve got to make a decision; do what’s right for your family.’ That seemed to hit home with Carlos.”

Before the meeting, Boras had told his client why he ought to consider Flushing. “Carlos, this is not the Mets. This is ‘The New Mets,’” the agent said. “I think you have to look at them when you meet with Fred.”

“This is ‘The New Mets,’” Beltran confided to Boras afterward, enthusiastically repeating the phrase the agent had planted in his head.

Still, when decision day arrived, and with the Astros set to lose negotiating rights at midnight, Mets brass had several anxious moments. In the early afternoon, Boras phoned Mets officials with bad news.

“We’re having second thoughts possibly of coming here,” Boras told them, bluntly suggesting they had been eliminated at one point during the conversation. Team officials suspected it might be a ruse to get them to bid against themselves. Unsure it was final, considering Boras’s master negotiating skills, they held out faint hope. Sure enough, Boras called back later in the afternoon and amended his statement, exclaiming, “Okay, you’re back in.”

“The whole time you’re wondering, ‘Is this a negotiating ploy or is this really real?’” Duquette said. “It just left you skeptical, because Scott has his negotiating style and you just don’t know. He’s a bright guy and you just don’t know if that’s part of his actual style to negotiate and create a sense of urgency.”

Eventually, Duquette headed home, where he received a call from a dejected Bernazard at 11:30 p.m.

“We lost him,” Bernazard said.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Duquette replied.

Fifteen minutes later, Mike Fiore, Boras’s top lieutenant, called Bernazard and told him: “You guys are the luckiest son of a guns I’ve ever seen.”

A full 180-degree turn.

Bernazard called back Duquette.

“We got him,” Bernazard said.

“What?” Duquette asked incredulously.

The Astros had refused to give a full no-trade clause. On top of that they offered less money—$105 million.

Boras even tried to engage the Yankees on the final evening to no avail, offering to put Beltran in pinstripes for a six-year, $100 million deal. GM Brian Cashman didn’t bite, the organization’s money committed to pitching—including the pursuit of Randy Johnson via a trade with the Arizona Diamondbacks, despite the aging Williams in centerfield. While impressed with Beltran, the Yankees had not valued him as a $16 million-a-year player. They didn’t want to pay the 40 percent luxury tax on that amount, either, or put Beltran at a salary level comparable to Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez.

“They were interested,” Beltran said, “but it would have been tough since, I believe, their payroll is over $200 million.”

The Mets and Boras’s associates worked all night to reach an agreement, with team officials concerned that unpredictable Yankees owner George Steinbrenner might change his mind if he had any chance to reflect and consider Beltran playing for seven years in Flushing. Boras halted discussions with Mets general counsel David Cohen about the final terms at 7 a.m. Pacific Standard Time that Sunday and slept off a twenty-five-and-a-half-hour day. Minaya, monitoring the situation from his New Jersey home, didn’t want Cohen to stop until they were done.

“Once daylight comes, you don’t know,” said Minaya, reiterating that the Yankees might have become involved had Beltran remained available into the week.

The victorious Minaya then dined with President Bush, his former Rangers boss, at the White House, and even the Commander in Chief, who once had famously traded away Sammy Sosa, had taken notice of the Mets’ winter.

“Keep up the good work,” Bush told Minaya. “I’ll be watching. Pick up some more guys.”

Eight days after Fred Wilpon’s visit, Beltran, who had solicited endorsements about playing in New York from Astros teammates Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, was being introduced as a Met, the first question coming in Spanish, another signal of the organization’s new international appeal. A new mantra that would make a Madison Avenue executive proud—“The New Mets”—was born, too, after Beltran smoothly reiterated the phrase at the packed media gathering at the Diamond Club at Shea Stadium, the same location as Pedro’s announcement. That is, once Beltran actually reached the Diamond Club. The news conference started a few minutes late as Beltran, his wife Jessica, Boras, Fiore, and nearly the entire Mets brain trust got stuck in a Shea Stadium elevator between the first and second floors en route to the event, though the mishap did not become public knowledge. Executive VP of business operations Dave Howard tried to pry open the doors with his hands as someone joked, “Everybody stop breathing so we don’t run out of air.”

Moments later, service restored, Beltran, dressed in a pinstriped suit, could utter his famous words: “I feel proud to be part of the new family, the New York Mets. The New Mets. I call it ‘The New Mets’ because this organization is going to a different direction, the right direction—the direction of winning.”

Throughout the season, Mets staffers would answer phones with the greeting, “New Mets.” The front of the media guide would carry the slogan, with New accentuated in orange and the other words in white. And if you ever got placed on hold while calling Shea Stadium, the recording prominently included Beltran’s utterance from the news conference as part of a loop.

Boras really deserved royalties for use of the phrase, but his cut of the seven-year, $119 million contract would have to suffice.

“That was kind of a theme we took in on the day of the press conference, when I said, ‘Don’t forget what you told me in Puerto Rico—that this is ‘The New Mets.’ It really came out of our dialogue,” Boras said.

Said Beltran: “That came out because this year the Mets went out and added new people; first of all, to the front office, like adding Omar Minaya and Tony Bernazard. And then they went out and hired Willie Randolph and Pedro. So that let me know they were going in a different direction. . . . I really believe now players are going to look at the Mets differently, with more respect.”

“I just didn’t think we’d be able to sign a Carlos Beltran,” Minaya said.

Beltran had grown tired of instability, the annual possibility of being traded while playing for the small-market Kansas City Royals. And while a cynic might suggest the $119 million offer and nothing else prompted Beltran to choose the Mets—perhaps a valid assumption given Boras’s track record of sending clients to the highest bidder despite the team’s potential for winning, like Pudge Rodriguez’s marriage to the Detroit Tigers—Beltran suggested otherwise. Had the Astros come through with a full no-trade clause, a guarantee he would remain in Houston for the length of the seven-year contract, Beltran insisted he very likely would have re-signed with the club he carried to within a game of the World Series in 2004.

“We were close to making a deal with them, but there was some commitment wanted, especially with the no-trade clause,” Beltran told Christian Red of the Daily News. This interview took place at the outfielder’s parents’ home in Manatí, Puerto Rico, as Beltran’s squirrel-sized pet monkey mingled in the den and consumed human baby food. “That’s the difference between the Mets and the Astros. I’ve been waiting to get to this point, and I didn’t want to go through what I went through in Kansas City. I wanted to go to one place for a long time.”

Typical of the Yankees, though—they still managed to steal the tabloid covers the day of the announcement. They had swung the long-anticipated deal with Arizona for Johnson, and staged their Big Unit news conference in the Bronx three hours after the Mets’ Beltran introduction. In truth, Jeff Wilpon and Yankees counterpart Randy Levine had worked together to avoid conflict and leave both teams happy. But the Yankees got the more prominent attention on the day of the dueling news conferences. After arriving in New York, Johnson created headlines by shoving Channel 2 cameraman Vinny Everett on Madison Avenue en route to his physical. The Daily News headline: 1 walk, 1 hit, 1 error. And considerably less Mets presence on newsstands as a result.

Of course, Minaya hadn’t even considered Beltran early in the winter, in part because the Mets had Cameron. It was Sosa who had generated the early buzz, his time with the Chicago Cubs about to expire because of feuding with manager Dusty Baker. The final straw was when Sosa left Wrigley Field fifteen minutes after the season finale started against the Atlanta Braves on October 3, 2004, something he initially denied, though a surveillance camera in the players’ parking lot conclusively proved otherwise. To illustrate the untenable situation, it was Cubs management that revealed the existence of the video to Chicago media.

Minaya, credited with signing a sixteen-year-old Sosa two decades earlier while with the Texas Rangers, fueled the speculation, intentionally or not. In December, Minaya attended the ceremony where Sosa and his wife Sonia renewed their wedding vows. The trade chatter got so loud that Cliff Floyd became convinced he was relocating to his native Windy City. Floyd had even picked out where he would live, near trendy Navy Pier. When Floyd ran into Sosa at a Miami Heat–Indiana Pacers basketball game at the height of the buzz, the Cub quizzed Floyd about playing in New York, figuring they would be teammates, not aware they would be exchanged. Floyd didn’t volunteer that information.

“I have agents that pretty much kept me informed with everything,” Floyd said. “They would call me, and the phone calls would be ‘9-1-1 return’ calls. I’m thinking, ‘Hell, I’m traded.’ . . . The talk was Sammy. I was like, ‘Well, maybe this is what it’s going to be.’ How can you hate that, going to Chicago, being my hometown? Around that time I got a couple of calls from Omar and then I just left it alone after that.”

In the end, sometimes the best moves are the ones not made. Sosa ended up with the Baltimore Orioles, where he had a .221 average and fourteen homers when he landed on the disabled list August 26 with a toe injury. Soon afterward he departed for his Florida home. The Cubs had picked up $12 million of Sosa’s $17 million salary for 2005, plus a $3.5 million severance payment. The Orioles owed Sosa $5 million for ’05, plus got an option for ’06 at $18 million with a $4.5 million buyout. Baltimore also shipped second baseman Jerry Hairston and minor-leaguers Dave Crouthers and Mike Fontenot to the Windy City.

Floyd would eventually assume Piazza’s cleanup role and hear “MVP, MVP” chants at Shea Stadium during the season.

“We couldn’t fit him in at the number the Cubs wanted us to pick up,” Minaya said. “We could have gotten down to a number that fit for us, but going down, we had to give better prospects. We just couldn’t do that. My heart probably would have said, ‘Oh yeah, give them the prospects,’ but that’s not a wise thing to do and in the best interest of the organization.”

“He’s my friend,” Sosa said about Minaya. “A lot of people got confused because he went to my house. They say something negative because he went to my wedding. I invited him to it before. Omar, he’s like my father. Omar was one of the guys who signed me when I was a minor-leaguer. . . . He was one of the guys who discovered me. To go back to Omar, it would have been nice, but it didn’t happen. We cannot feel bad.”

Their winter renovation practically complete, Mets brass still had some unfinished business. Jeff Wilpon had promised Pedro a return trip to the Dominican Republic, and the Mets made good in January, after a stopover in Atlanta where they visited Cameron to allay any concerns about the move to right field to accommodate Beltran.

Cameron, over lunch, never requested a trade, though agent Mike Nicotera had already tactfully let it be known that exploring options which could place Cameron in centerfield elsewhere would be ideal. After all, Cameron was a two-time Gold Glove winner at the position. And though Cameron had offered his blessing to pursue Beltran earlier in the winter, it must have been difficult at the time to conceive that it actually would materialize.

Beltran joining the Mets certainly had seemed a long shot when the organization was pursuing him via a trade during the 2004 season, before Kansas City Royals GM Allard Baird shipped Beltran to the Astros. Yet with the Mets in Kansas City for interleague play before that deal, Cameron, asked about the possibility of Beltran becoming his teammate, barked in reference to his own signing with the organization: “I would have went on to Atlanta. I could have played right field anywhere.”

Said a less-than-bubbly Cameron on a conference call with reporters the night of the visit by Mets brass to Atlanta: “I had reservations about it for the simple reason that I’ve never done it before. The one thing we came to terms with today was, I’m here to do what’s in the best interests of the ball club, and try to put this team back on the map.”

A whirlwind visit in the Dominican Republic ensued, beginning at the Mets’ baseball academy on a sunny, mid-eighties day in Boca de Niqua, thirty miles west of Santo Domingo. It included dinner that evening with President Leonel Fernández Reyna, during which a late-arriving Pedro implored Jeff Wilpon to drink the local brew.

“We made Jeff drink an El Presidente,” Pedro recalled. “When you come to the Dominican, you have to drink Presidente. He’s like, ‘Well, but I’m driving.’ ‘No, drink a Presidente,’ then you go wherever we were going to go.”

Pedro had been at the beach, then hanging out with the chief executive’s bodyguards, and his tardiness was just viewed as another of his charming personality traits, which Mets bullpen coach Guy Conti noted is something to bear in mind if Pedro should ever arrive late to a ballpark. “People worry about Pedro. He was late for the President,” said Conti, an eighteen-year-old Pedro’s first pitching coach in the United States, in Great Falls, Montana, where Conti taught the future ace his devastating changeup.

What followed was a late-night drive through the downtown streets of the capital, with Jeff Wilpon at the wheel of Pedro’s yellow Ferrari and the ace driving the red Ferrari he had bought for his brother Ramon. Pedro purposely ran a red light, alarming the younger Wilpon, who refused to do the same thing and seemingly commit a moving violation, even if word never would have made it back to the New York DMV.

“In the Dominican after like ten, ten-thirty, eleven, you just check on the lights and make sure no one is coming,” Pedro said. “I saw the red light. No one was around the street so I just went through it. He was going bananas when he saw I went across a red light.”

Jeff Wilpon’s thanks for stopping at the red light?

“A Hummer almost ran up my ass,” the younger Wilpon said.

Said Pedro: “He’s a young man. I figured he’s pretty much like me. He’s a good driver. I mean, if you can drive in New York, you’re certainly capable of driving anywhere else.”

They finished the night on Pedro’s fifty-two-foot boat, where the ace spends nights during the off-season, eating lobster out of the pool-like waters of nearby islands, which are cooked on the spot.

Soon afterward, Pedro was in New York for the Mets’ late-January winter caravan, a weeklong series of stops to benefit charities around the city and gain publicity for the upcoming season. He acted like a model citizen despite his reputation in Boston as a diva needing special treatment. Well, Pedro was there the first day, at least.

The ace follows a strict off-season training program and believes detours to Manhattan in the middle of the winter can be disruptive. Yet Pedro was charming and bold at the kickoff held in a lower Manhattan art gallery adjacent to the New York Stock Exchange, even as he warned people to not expect him back at the annual event in January 2006. Pedro went so far as to predict the Mets could overtake the Yankees for the hearts and attention of the city—the Yankees who had epically lost to Pedro’s Red Sox in the ’04 American League Championship Series after leading three games to none, and who were without a World Series title since beating the Mets in the Subway Series in 2000.

“After this season, I don’t know if we’ll be second,” Pedro said.

Reprinted from Pedro, Carlos and Omar, by Adam Rubin (copyright 2006), published by The Lyons Press. You can order the book from Amazon.com.