Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson Has Cancer

Just months after engineering a series of trade deadline moves that catapulted the New York Mets to the World Series, general manager Sandy Alderson has been diagnosed with cancer.

The team confirmed that the diagnoses was made last month; the cancer is “very treatable” and Alderson will begin chemotherapy this week.

He will understandably miss Major League Baseball’s winter meetings, which take place in Nashville next week. His colleagues, however, are prepared to pick up the slack in his absence.

“We’ll have plenty of access to Sandy,” assistant general manager John Ricco said. “We talk to him all the time. He was with us the whole day with [free agent Ben] Zobrist the other day. So I don’t envision that being an issue. He’s a phone call away.

“The nature of our business is we’re all moving around a lot all the time. It’s not like your typical everybody shows up at nine o’clock in the morning, meets and then goes through their day. A lot of it is done by phone. A lot of it is done already that way. J.P. [Ricciardi, the special assistant to the general manager] and Paul [DePodesta,vice president of amateur scouting and player development] are out scouting. So that’s not going to be that big of an adjustment.”

Days after the season ended, Alderson collapsed after a press conference at Citi Field. He missed the GM Meetings a week later to undergo a medical procedure and during that procedure that doctors confirmed a cancer diagnosis

Photo: Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson attends batting practice prior to a game between the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves at Citi Field on April 21, 2015 in the Flushing neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York City. (Photo by Alex Trautwig/Getty Images)

Article by Joe Kozlowski