#Rays’ Bobby Heck on Sandy Alderson’s Mets front office wish list

Sandy Alderson’s return to the Mets as team president officially began Friday, but he also had a six-week head start to formulate plans for a new front office.

That suggests the turnaround will be short before he implements his plan to hire a president of baseball operations and a general manager to thrust the Mets into an offseason that could include free-agent pursuits such as Trevor Bauer, J.T. Realmuto and George Springer. A club source half-jokingly suggested the front-office hirings could happen faster than it took the United States to elect a new president.

Alderson’s first act in his new role on Friday was to announce the departures of GM Brodie Van Wagenen and assistants Allard Baird and Adam Guttridge, along with director of player development Jared Banner and special assistant Omar Minaya.

Multiple sources Saturday said Bobby Heck is among the candidates receiving strong consideration to replace Van Wagenen as the head of baseball operations. The 54-year-old Heck has spent the past eight seasons as a special assistant with the Rays, contributing to a front office that is perennially considered among baseball’s best and brightest.

Heck previously served as scouting director with the Astros, overseeing drafts that netted Springer, Carlos Correa and J.D. Martinez, among others.

“He is really a guy that has been under the radar,” said a person who has worked with Heck. “Everybody has their inside contacts and he’s been around the game long enough, but he doesn’t appear to be a self-promoter. It’s surprising that his name hasn’t come up more often.”

Heck’s name arose with the Mets two years ago in their GM search — he was recommended to former team COO Jeff Wilpon by Steve Cohen, then a minority partner. Cohen now owns the team, after completing his $2.4 billion purchase of the Mets from Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz on Friday.

If Heck were hired, it would go against the pure analytics trend.

“If you had to put a percentage on [Heck], I would say a larger percentage would be toward baseball/scouting guy than analytics,” the person who has worked with Heck said. “But he’s smart enough to understand you have more information now than you ever had and it just depends on how you want to use it.”

A bigger fish would be Rays GM Erik Neander, the architect of the team that lost to the Dodgers in the World Series. But there are questions of whether Rays owner Stu Sternberg would allow Cohen (of whom he isn’t particularly fond, according to a source) to poach Neander.

Other names who could gain traction include Indians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti, Indians GM Mike Chernoff, Athletics assistant GM Billy Owens and former Blue Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi, who has twice worked under Alderson.

Friday’s purge wasn’t unexpected for many in the organization, given that Van Wagenen, Baird, Guttridge and Banner were all imported following Alderson’s resignation as GM in 2018. The toughest call for Alderson might have been Minaya, a former Mets GM who returned after the 2016 season to help bolster the organization’s international scouting. But Minaya’s hiring was forced on Alderson by the Wilpons, a mark against him during the regime change.

For those who survived the purge, there is a sense of relief that Alderson, who served as the team’s GM for 7 ½ seasons, has returned to oversee the organization.

“Of all the people I have been around, I don’t respect any of them more than Sandy,” one team official said. “He’s just that type of person.”