Brodie Van Wagenen is well respected for his work as a players' agent, for his ability to forge relationships and contacts. He is an experienced negotiator -- "great in the room," as one of his peers says -- someone who has successfully read the market and clinched better deals for his clients.
Based on his experience, however, he is as qualified to be the Mets' first baseman as he is to run the organization's baseball operations -- which is to say, he's not really qualified at all. And beyond the inherent questions of practical application, the Mets' move to hire Van Wagenen is so overloaded with conflict-of-interest quandaries that folks on all sides of the industry, from Major League Baseball to the union to club management, find the choice to be bizarre and inevitably problematic.
It is the prerogative of Fred and Jeff Wilpon to pick anybody they want, and it's possible that Van Wagenen has a hidden talent for managing his bosses and running a baseball front office. The Golden State Warriors hired former agent Bob Myers to run their basketball operations, and he's been a driving force behind a dynasty.
But baseball is very different in its administration than basketball, with more players and layers of performance development. Among many baseball officials and agents familiar with the Mets' organization and the challenges and complications that Van Wagenen will face, there are ominous forecasts of disaster. Rather than seeing stability in the successor to Sandy Alderson, they see an organization inexplicably accelerating toward a cliff.
"Very strange," said one longtime evaluator. "It's going to take Brodie awhile to get his feet under him, and by the time he even has a chance to get through that learning curve, he's going to get swallowed up. It's like expecting the impossible. Nobody gets the kind of time he'll need to learn on the job anymore, especially because they expect to win."
Moneyball inspired a generation of really smart folks to pass up futures in the law or on Wall Street and instead go into baseball, and now Major League Baseball has more highly qualified, well-trained and experienced front office candidates than ever before. The Mets instead hired somebody who has never worked within a team.
"What they need," said one long-time executive, "is somebody like Sandy Alderson."
In other words: someone with the stature and experience to at least attempt to maintain an equilibrium within an organization that is often chaotic because of an unusual chain of command. On a given day, staffers aren't sure if the decisions are being influenced by the GM, or Jeff Wilpon, or Omar Minaya, who is one of the team's advisors. Something as simple as a player's promotion from the minor leagues isn't always so simple. And the internal conflicts -- second-guessing at best, back-stabbing at worst -- play out through leaks far more often than most organizations. You might want to blame the New York media for that, but the Wilpons are responsible for the franchise's culture and for the fact that managers from Willie Randolph to Terry Collins to Mickey Callaway have had to endure constant anonymous updates on their job insecurity.
Van Wagenen will be the next guy to try to navigate through all of this. Others describe his relationship with Jeff Wilpon as a friendship, and the sheer number of Mets who have been represented by the agent suggests that the Wilpon-Van Wagenen connection has served the players and the team well. But all involved should fully understand that once Van Wagenen signs the paper to join the Mets, that relationship that is apparently at the root of this hire will be forever changed. That relationship will evaporate.
They will no longer be collegial peers, but employer and employee, with Van Wagenen obligated to respond to every Wilpon call, every whim, every idea, every rant. In the past, Van Wagenen negotiated with Jeff Wilpon, always with the option to walk away or hang up the phone. Now he must answer to him, follow his directives, bend to his will.
The politics of all organizations can be difficult, but Van Wagenen will have to try to do that while also wading through a morass of potential conflicts, like just a few posed by executives and agents:
• Presumably, he's already been involved in the preparation of the Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard arbitration cases. Shouldn't the union and the players be concerned about what he knows, and about the arguments to be made?
• Last spring, Van Wagenen issued a statement in which he suggested that MLB teams might be in collusion to tamp down salaries. At a time when MLB and the union are fighting over the financial landscape of player compensation, where does Van Wagenen stand? One executive wondered if he would be viewed as a Trojan horse by other executives, in industry conversations about the market.
• Presumably, Van Wagenen knows as much or more about his clients' health issues as any team -- and the union could and should worry about how that could affect the players' marketability.
• As Van Wagenen shifts into a new role, how could his relationship with deGrom, Syndergaard and others play into club decisions? Would he be wholly representing the Mets' interests, or the players? Because there can't be middle ground; it's one or the other. And if Van Wagenen builds a wall between he and his former clients, out of necessity, is this going to be a problem?
"You could go on and on and on about [potential] conflicts," said one evaluator. "The list is endless."
This will not be the first unusual hiring in baseball. Dave Stewart's tenure as the leader of the Diamondbacks' baseball operations department was brief and dysfunctional, after he tried to shift from player agent to baseball executive. The Padres once picked announcer Jerry Coleman as their manager -- and Jerry was always the first to say afterward he was awful at the job. The White Sox anointed Hawk Harrelson as their GM, and Harrelson says now he really wasn't prepared for the work, despite a lifetime in baseball. The Marlins shifted Dan Jennings from the front office into the role of manager, and while Jennings is very respected -- like Van Wagenen -- he was completely ill-suited for that particular job, and the players felt it immediately, believing it only added to the Miami circus.
You can't blame Van Wagenen for taking his shot at running a ball club in sports' biggest market. It should be a dream job for somebody, and maybe it will become his. But unless the Mets streamline their chain of command and trust Van Wagenen to make the baseball decisions -- giving him lots and lots of time and space to learn, to sort through those conflicts of interest and to make mistakes -- the team will conduct more introductory news conferences sooner than later.
They need to pick a guy and get out of the way, or pick somebody better suited for the job.