In Mets' draft, David Stearns and Kris Gross face 'a really difficult beast to tame'

Thirteen years ago, with their first pick of the Sandy Alderson era, the Mets drafted a skinny kid from Wyoming.

At the time, Brandon Nimmo was a risky choice. He hadn’t played high school ball — his home state didn’t offer it as a scholastic sport — so he was limited to American Legion action. After he signed, Nimmo took batting practice in front of then-owner Fred Wilpon, who turned to his scouting bosses and asked if they were sure this was the right guy.

In recent years, Nimmo has proved doubters wrong about being merely a fourth outfielder, his ability to hit lefthanders and the fit in centerfield.

Now Nimmo is a lasting piece of Alderson’s Mets legacy. He has blossomed into a bona fide franchise cornerstone: deserving of an All-Star nod despite being snubbed this year, team leader and recipient of the second-largest contract in the organization’s history.

As the Mets enter another draft — Sunday night through Tuesday — they do so at the outset of another new era. Just as Nimmo was Alderson’s first pick, the talented youngster who goes 19th overall to the Mets will become the first selection under president of baseball operations David Stearns.

Stearns and his staff aren’t necessarily looking for another Nimmo. Even first-rounders don’t often become that caliber of player. But they will seek stars and other contributors throughout the 20 rounds over three days.

“The draft is a really difficult beast to tame,” Stearns said in a recent interview. “We’re doing our best to create a repeatable process that gives us the best chance of results over time. We’re certainly not going to get fixated with the results of any particular decision.”   

The new boss

In Stearns’ chaotic but productive first weeks on the job last autumn, he identified the draft as an area in which he wanted to install new leadership. He found about a half-dozen “serious candidates that I did significant vetting on,” he said, and landed on one: Kris Gross, hired as vice president of amateur scouting.

Gross and Stearns were acquainted from their overlapping years (2013-15) with the Astros. Stearns was an assistant general manager, Gross the West Coast supervisor.

But what impressed Stearns more was what Gross had done in the years since, ascending the ranks and eventually running Houston’s draft.

“Kris brings a really unique skill set,” Stearns said. “Ultimately, these jobs running departments are big management jobs. Kris has a really, really big staff that works for him. He has to know how to put those people in positions to succeed. He has to know how to keep them motivated. And ultimately he has to know how to take all the information around him and make decisions. That is not always that easy.

“Kris, from his skill set and also through demonstrated ability, has shown that he does a good job with this. So he seemed like a really good candidate for the job.”

Consider: During Gross’ 11 seasons with the Astros, they led everybody with 58 major-leaguers produced via the draft, the lifeblood of their near-constant triumphs — including seven consecutive trips to the ALCS. They succeeded in making an infamously frustrating, futile crapshoot of a process slightly less so.

The Mets’ previous longtime draft head, Tommy Tanous, moved into a more general vice president/special adviser role. He “very much so” has remained involved this time around, according to Gross, seeing “a healthy dose of amateur players.”

“He’s weighing in on all of these meetings,” Gross said. “He’s an influential and very smart evaluator and we’re very lucky to have him being a part of the process here.”   

In the room

In the final days before the draft — the Super Bowl for this corner of the organization — the Mets brought their amateur scouts, some analytics folks, senior baseball operations officials and others together in Port St. Lucie, Florida, huddled up for long days of in-depth reviews of hundreds of high school and college players and possible future Mets.

Gross described the group as “several dozen, less than a hundred.” Stearns joined by video call during the week and in person for the weekend.

“We have to bring extra chairs from a different area,” Gross said.

The dynamic in the room has been healthier this year than in the recent past, according to a person familiar with the situation. In practice, that has meant more voices being heard, which has resulted in less tension.

That is the culmination of nine months of blending of routines and cultures since Gross came aboard. He arrived from Houston. Stearns had a certain way of doing things with Milwaukee. They have worked with a Mets staff that is almost entirely inherited; it’s difficult to make major changes mid-cycle, which is where the Mets were at the time of Gross’ hire.

The challenge since then, Gross said, has been making sure everybody understands each other. After working for so long with the same core Astros group, running a department full of people who don’t know him has been a change.

“Just the amount of explaining our processes, giving evidence why certain things worked for us in Houston and teaching that on a grand scale to a big staff,” Gross said. “When you’re with an org for 10, 11 years, you kind of expect everybody to be able to latch on and understand new concepts that you bring to the table. Whereas over here, the Mets, it’s just little things — scout lingo, how people talk — that’s a little bit of an adjustment. But overall we still work in the same industry of hunting amateur talent and looking for big-leaguers, so a lot of it aligned.”

The Mets’ first-round spot got bumped back 10 picks to No. 19, part of the penalties that come with spending as much money as they did on their 2023 payroll. They had an outside shot at a top-six choice via the lottery system in December, but the odds were not in their favor. Gross called that development “obviously a little disheartening.”

“But where we ended up,” he said, “we still know we’re going to get a good player.”

Luhnow connection

Another connection between Stearns and Gross: They are branches off the tree of Jeff Luhnow, the disgraced, exiled former World Series-winning general manager of the Astros.

Luhnow got his start in baseball with the Cardinals, who put him in charge of the draft. Then the Astros hired him in part to implement the same system. Gross, who started as an entry-level area scout, followed him from St. Louis to Houston, working for Luhnow for more than a decade.

Early in his Astros tenure, Luhnow plucked the fast-rising Stearns away from Cleveland to be his AGM. They spent three seasons together.

(The Astros fired Luhnow in January 2020 during the fallout of the 2017 team’s illegal sign-stealing scandal.)

In separate interviews, Stearns and Gross echoed each other about the way their Luhnow years shaped their modern draft philosophies. Gross emphasized the significance of hard data; Stearns highlighted the importance of knowing what you want and sticking to it.

“In Houston, working with Jeff and Mike Elias, who was running the drafts at that point, there was a clearly defined process to how the picks were made,” Stearns said. “And I think that is something that perhaps Houston was a little bit ahead of the industry on at that time that probably has been replicated elsewhere. Jeff and Mike were very good at implementing a process and following that process. It allowed them to draft really good players over the years.”

Baseball already has seen one Luhnow offshoot — Elias’ Orioles — build from within to become a burgeoning power in the American League.

These Mets hope to do the same. The draft is central to owner Steve Cohen’s overarching goal of fielding a great team every season.

“Previous performance and the history of data you have on a player is very important. And how well you can as a group decipher it and use that data to your advantage can be a separator,” Gross said. “Obviously, that has developed infinite amounts since we started this. It was very much part of [Luhnow’s] process back then. Obviously, everybody is doing it to some degree nowadays.

“Having analysts who are really good at doing their job and can look for other ways to utilize it, but also having — because it’s still a human game — really good scouts out there who get the information, who can evaluate the players, who can really get to know the player.

“These are 18- to 20-year-old kids. A lot can happen. A lot changes over the next three to five years for them. Trying to best guess what will happen over that time is a main part of our job and what we strive to excel at.”

By Tim Healey

timothy.healey@newsday.com@timbhealey

Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.