Sandy Alderson it is, then.

Cool.

I resisted endorsing any of the GM candidates here, but that resistance grew difficult as I read more and more about Alderson. Here’s what I wrote on Oct. 11:

While I think the bluster about the particulars of the New York market is normally little more than the New York media overemphasizing the impact of the New York media, in this one instance I think it’s important the Mets hire someone they feel can withstand the pressure to compete immediately, shoulder the comparisons to the winning team across town, and exercise the requisite patience to turn the Mets into a successful, sustainable franchise.

And man, it sure sounds like Alderson is that dude. Read this. I’m nearly speechless. Giddy? Maybe.

A little bit skeptical? Always. But that ESPN interview, and all the stuff from DuckSnorts and everywhere else, really present Alderson as a confident leader well-versed in modern analytics. That’s, well, it’s nothing short of awesome.

As Mets fans, we’re innately cynical. We associate hope mostly with impending doom. We assume every decision the team makes is the wrong one, even when it appears to be the correct one on paper. Late at night, when we allow our rational minds to wander into less reasonable territories, we consider the possibility that our team is somehow cursed, that 1969 and 1986 were weird, miraculous digressions from an ignominious tradition of losing baseball.

And by “we” I mean “me.” I am an innately cynical Mets fan. I think those things sometimes.

Maybe Alderson changes that. Maybe, under Alderson, the Mets will remind us that objective analysis and sharp management trump fatalist mumbo-jumbo almost every time, in the same the way some lucky Red Sox fans realized the Curse of the Bambino was, in truth, little more than the Curse of a Decades-Long Saga of Mismanagement, Bad Luck and Bad Baseball, in the same way Rex Ryan took over the Jets and waved his middle finger in the face of perpetual mediocrity.

I don’t really know yet. But I know there’s now hope, a sneaking suspicion that someone in charge of the Mets might actually know what he’s doing, a feeling I haven’t had since… well, never. Not since I started understanding and paying attention to this stuff in the mid-90s.

Now all we need is patience. Well, pitching and middle-infield help and a manager, too, but mostly patience. It takes time to reshape a franchise from top-to-bottom, and since that appears to be Alderson’s M.O., it’s hard to expect he’ll have the team operating and developing players and playing baseball like he presumably wants it to by the time the Mets take the field in April.

But for once, we can imagine it eventually happening and know that it might not be a ridiculous pipedream. That might not be enough to put asses in seats in April or guarantee meaningful games in September, but it sure goes a hell of a long way to assuage the frustrations of fans fed up with false hustle, two closers and Prevention and Recovery.

Maybe it’s a new day, is what I’m saying. Looks like things are looking up.