PORT ST. LUCIE — The first blessing for Buck Showalter upon being named Yankees manager was what was in the rearview mirror.
Showalter was organized and savvy, but he was going to get those points simply by not being Stump Merrill. His grace period was extended because the contrast between him and his predecessor was so favorable.
This is part of sports life. Whom you succeed matters. Mike Matheny is trying to replace Tony La Russa as Cardinals manager this year, and, let’s face it, in the comparison game that is a tougher deal than Dale Sveum taking over for Mike Quade with the Cubs.
Sandy Alderson enjoyed the twin blessings upon his arrival with the Mets. He wasn’t Omar Minaya and he wasn’t a Wilpon. That has given him a grace period to do what traditionally brings wrath upon a general manager: Cut payroll and expectations simultaneously.
But, fair or not, the honeymoon has an expiration date. Soon it will not matter whom he replaced or who signs his paychecks. No one is going to care how long it takes to turn debris into a flourishing farm system. No one is going to care that it takes longer to deconstruct the noxious culture of an organization than it took for the layers of inefficiency and instability to form. No one is going to care the financial hurdles are far more problematic than even Alderson envisioned when accepting this huge challenge. And no one is going to care the Mets are in financial retreat as the rest of the NL East has a more full-throttle approach.
The beleaguered loyalists want their summers filled with something more than promises of better days and hopes for a magic bullet from the courts to terminate Wilpon ownership immediately.
The court ruling yesterday that Mets ownership and its subsidiaries must pay as much as $83 million to the trustee in the Bernie Madoff clawback case did not offer closure nor did the setting of a March 19 court date for the trustee to pursue more substantial funds. The case — and the countersuits it almost certainly will spawn — promises to drag on. Thus, so does the financial gloom that looms over the organization.
This is why Alderson’s goodwill clock is ticking. Fans and media will not put off indefinitely how long he has to author a product that will defy that shrinking payroll. While the anger is raw against ownership, I sense fatigue setting in on this soap opera. Fans are trying to recondition muscles of optimism associated with this time of year.
Alderson needs progress. In wins. In growth of players. In unmistakable earmarks of a better tomorrow coming, well, a lot closer to tomorrow than a few years down the road.
“No one has higher expectations for myself than me,” Alderson said. “I expect people to have strong feelings and high expectations and that they need to see immediate improvement.”
When asked to define 2012 progress, Alderson says his goals are the playoffs regardless of how futile that may seem to the outside world. The irony is for his team to even flirt with such notions he is almost exclusively at the mercy of youngsters brought in during a Minaya regime that was viewed as a failure because of, among other things, lack of clear vision when it came to player development.
Alderson has had just one draft and made just one significant trade that brought Zack Wheeler for Carlos Beltran. So he needs Minaya leftovers such as Ike Davis and Lucas Duda, Daniel Murphy and Josh Thole, Jon Niese and Ruben Tejada, Mike Pelfrey and Bobby Parnell, and the young pitchers Jeurys Familia, Matt Harvey and Jenrry Mejia to form a nucleus that outperforms tepid expectations this year while evoking real hope moving forward.
“We are on a dual track trying to do as well as we can now at the major-league level without sacrificing a longer-term proposition,” Alderson said. “I think we are capable of doing that. My expectations for our major league team are not lessened by what needs to be done at the minor league level. I was very disappointed we did not have a winning record last year and will feel the same way this year.”
Alderson was hired and sold as the studious adult who can navigate around ownership malfeasance to win with the Mets. The clock is ticking on results. Simply not being Minaya or Wilpon will offer protection for only so long.
joel.sherman@nypost.com