Today Sandy Alderson clarified comments he made in his upcoming biography “Baseball Maverick” (Anthony DiComo). Alderson minimized the impact of the Mets financial woes saying that it has never been a problem for him during his tenure as Mets General Manager.
“Some people want to interpret the last four years strictly in terms of what financial resources were available or were not available to the Mets,” Alderson said. “That’s never been an issue for me. I’ve never talked about the payroll as an unfortunate limitation to us. I haven’t talked about it recently, haven’t talked about it in the past, don’t intend to. It’s not relevant to me. The last four years is a story of putting the franchise back into a competitive situation on the field, with good players. I think we’re on the cusp of doing that.”
“We had talked about I think an $85-million payroll, roughly, and there was a period of time we were below that,” Alderson said of 2014. “Everybody was like, we had to meet this standard. It became more about the payroll than about anything else.
“Every team has a weakness and we saw the same thing this year, where we made some moves early in the offseason and we didn’t make any moves thereafter. What happens is that the novelty of the acquisitions wears off, and at some point people start looking for something else. That happened to us this year. It happened to us last year. But if you go back and look at our bullpen situation, it rectified itself pretty well once we got into the season. So it’s not always about spending money, and I think that’s the approach that we’ve all taken over the last several years.”
