The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is read about five or six blogs, including a few baseball blogs, and this morning I found out that the Mets have hired Sandy Alderson to be their new GM. The move was very much expected for quite some time now. I'm cautiously optimistic, though I don't see the Mets being all that much better than they were this year until 2012 at the earliest. I know very little about Alderson except that he ran some of the successful Oakland A's teams of the 80s and 90s, including the World Series champion A's of 1988. I seem to remember him coming off as a dickhead in Howard Bryant's book about the steroid era, Juicing the Game, but being a nice guy does not necessarily translate into being a good GM. It will be a major improvement on things if he can bring some seriousness to the job and some respectability to an organization that has been in disarray since getting bounced from the NLCS in 2006 at the hands of the underdog St. Louis Cardnials. Alderson is a bit of an old fart at 62, and the game has changed a lot since the last time he was a GM, so we'll have to see whether he's able to adapt. 
His first move as the head of baseball operations will be to hire a new manager. I have been hoping that Wally Backman would be given the call because he's fiery, stresses fundamentals, and doesn't tolerate players who don't play hard and hustle. Backman would be a bit of a wild card with his lack of Major League managerial experience, his hair trigger temper, and his fairly recent history of off-the-field problems, all of which could be strikes against him for somebody as buttoned down as Alderson appears to be. But Backman would inject some personality into the team and would bring some fun and excitement back to Queens. On top of this, hiring Backman would be a nod to the team's history and tradition, which I think is important. My sense is that somebody vanilla like Bob Melvin is more likely to get the call. But fans should not expect miracles right away. The Mets still have horrible contracts on their books that they will have to either eat or trade in exchange for somebody else's shit. Oliver Perez, Luis Castillo, Francisco Roddriguez, and Carlos Beltran together account for roughly $50 million in salary for the coming season, which is about a third of the team's on-field payroll, and this will severely limit the kinds of moves the team can make in the near future. The good news is that all these contracts, with the possible exception of K-Rod if he meets certain vesting benchmarks, will be gone after 2011, so we will not get a full sense of Alderson's competence until this time next year. In any case, it feels good as a Met fan to see the team starting to move in the right direction, or at least I hope it's the right direction...
His first move as the head of baseball operations will be to hire a new manager. I have been hoping that Wally Backman would be given the call because he's fiery, stresses fundamentals, and doesn't tolerate players who don't play hard and hustle. Backman would be a bit of a wild card with his lack of Major League managerial experience, his hair trigger temper, and his fairly recent history of off-the-field problems, all of which could be strikes against him for somebody as buttoned down as Alderson appears to be. But Backman would inject some personality into the team and would bring some fun and excitement back to Queens. On top of this, hiring Backman would be a nod to the team's history and tradition, which I think is important. My sense is that somebody vanilla like Bob Melvin is more likely to get the call. But fans should not expect miracles right away. The Mets still have horrible contracts on their books that they will have to either eat or trade in exchange for somebody else's shit. Oliver Perez, Luis Castillo, Francisco Roddriguez, and Carlos Beltran together account for roughly $50 million in salary for the coming season, which is about a third of the team's on-field payroll, and this will severely limit the kinds of moves the team can make in the near future. The good news is that all these contracts, with the possible exception of K-Rod if he meets certain vesting benchmarks, will be gone after 2011, so we will not get a full sense of Alderson's competence until this time next year. In any case, it feels good as a Met fan to see the team starting to move in the right direction, or at least I hope it's the right direction... 
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