Sandy will bring fight to cancer

Sandy Alderson, the Mets general manager now diagnosed with what we are told is a treatable form of cancer, is one of the best and most decent people I have ever met in baseball.

He is, and always has been, a gent.

He fought for his country once, in Vietnam, and always makes me think of something my dad, who fought for his country with the 15th Air Force, once said.

“When you get to come home knowing other guys just like you didn’t,” Bene Lupica said, “you never sweat the small stuff ever again.”

So it’s always been baseball with Sandy Alderson, just not life and death, even when the part of the city that cares deeply about the Mets was acting that way in the middle of the summer, which means before Alderson started to have as great a summer as any New York baseball general manager has ever had.

This is not small stuff for Alderson, fighting cancer at his age.

He is no more a victim because of cancer, cancer coming for him this way after one of the shining seasons of his career, than anybody else.

He will have the best doctors and the best attitude, and hopefully the new year will begin so much better than this one ends for him, and for his family.

There is an old line, from a novelist named James Lane Allen, about how adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it.

But if you know Alderson, you know that his character was revealed a long time ago.

His own battle with cancer will merely reinforce it.