Alderson gets high grades from those who know him

If Sandy Alderson sounds like a savior for the troubled Mets franchise, it's probably because he's been asked to be one a few times before.

From the rebuilding days of the Athletics during the early 1980s to his troubleshooting assignments for the commissioner's office, Alderson has the reputation of identifying a problem and fixing it, which explains why the Wilpons will introduce him Friday as Mets general manager during a news conference at Citi Field. Alderson received a four-year contract, two people familiar with the situation confirmed Thursday.

"I think that he has great foresight," said Reds GM Walt Jocketty, who worked with Alderson in Oakland. "With the Mets talking about bringing somebody in to kind of change the culture, I think he would certainly be very good at that."

Judging by the drumbeat in New York for Alderson, what isn't he good at? A former commanding officer in the Marines, tour of duty in Vietnam, Harvard Law graduate - it's not the typical resume of a baseball executive. At least the military service part isn't. Thanks to Alderson, the new breed of baseball GMs is a sabermetric-studied, Ivy League-educated class that has revolutionized the job, as he did when he became the A's GM in 1982.

That was an experiment in itself. Alderson, now 62, was brought aboard from a private law firm in Oakland as the team's general counsel before he took over as GM, at the age of 35, with the A's coming off a 94-loss season. Alderson helped assist in the purchase of the Oakland franchise from Charlie Finley, and Roy Eisenhardt, who was the club's president at the time, believed that he was well-suited for rebuilding a team that had no infrastructure.

"We were starting from scratch - we had almost no farm system, we had no scouting system, we had nothing," Eisenhardt said Thursday in a telephone interview, "so I needed somebody who had management skills, and people skills, and the ability to negotiate contracts.

"There was just so many baseball transactional things in addition to the normal things that it struck me as logical to have somebody really smart with a good head on his shoulders, who had been through very real life experiences by being in the Marines and in Vietnam. Then bring in baseball expertise."

Six years later, the A's won 104 games, earning the first of three straight AL West titles and World Series appearances. Oakland won the World Series in 1989 with a four-game sweep of the Giants.

"There was a plan there," said Eisenhardt, now the interim president of the San Francisco Art Institute. "That's what Sandy's really good at. That's the thing to watch for with the Mets . . . there's a plan for creating a team and sustaining performance."

During that building process in Oakland, Alderson hired Billy Beane, the man who would succeed him as A's GM in 1997 and further develop his mentor's stat-driven evaluation techniques into the "Moneyball" phenomenon. Of all the praise Alderson has received from colleagues - and there has been plenty during his 30-year career in baseball - Beane takes it to lengths that deify his former boss.

"I think he's infallible," Beane once told USA Today.

Alderson made the same impression on commissioner Bud Selig, who twice drafted him to work on special projects for Major League Baseball. After he left the A's, Alderson was hired as MLB's executive vice president for baseball operations, a position that put him in charge of umpiring reform and the sport's international development. During that time, he established MLB's headquarters in the Dominican Republic and also began the process of verifying the ages and identities of players.

In 2005, Alderson, restless for a return to a team's front-office structure, joined the Padres as chief executive officer and minority owner. That produced mixed results, with the Padres making two playoff appearances - losing in the first round each time - during Alderson's tenure before he returned to the commissioner's office in 2009 to again head a reform project in the D.R.

That lasted only 19 months when Alderson, the leading candidate from the start, landed the Mets' GM job this week.

Eisenhardt expects Alderson to succeed in New York - as long as he's given control of the organization.

"He's very honest, straightforward and candid, and says exactly what he thinks," Eisenhardt said. "That's a rare talent and it goes a long way. I think when you put somebody in charge - to quote a famous ex-president [George W. Bush] - they want to know that they're 'The Decider.' I think that's appropriate in this case."