As crushing as this news is for the Mets, it shouldn’t be an excuse to now treat 2014 as they did 2013. They still have plenty of good, young pitching, and if they spend money as they claim they will, there’s no reason they can’t still make significant strides next season.
The cruel reality is that there is no sure way of predicting or preventing injuries to young pitchers, no matter how much baseball people obsess over innings limits these days. It’s just that Matt Harvey had an aura about him that made you think he would be immune to such human frailty.
For one thing, he was the Dark Knight and all that. As macho as they come when he takes the rubber.
Perhaps more significantly, scouts said he had the cleanest delivery you could ever hope for from a power pitcher. So it wasn’t only the Mets who were stunned by the news that Harvey has a ligament tear in his elbow.
“With (Stephen) Strasburg’s delivery, you could see it coming,’’ one NL scout said on Monday. “But Harvey, he was so free and easy, and he always looked like he was on time with that delivery, so even though he was a max-effort guy, he wasn’t putting extra stress on his arm.
“It just tells you the arm isn’t built to withstand the torque of throwing 98 miles per hour. Too bad, though. Man, I love watching that kid pitch.’’
Yes, there was something about Harvey’s intensity, his attack mentality, that resonated with people, from the casual fan to the most hardened observer.
More than that, he was the new Seaver, the new Gooden — like them, too electrifying for even the baseball gods to stand in the way of another winning era in Queens that would finally put an end to all the recent misery around the Mets.
Only now he’s probably headed for Tommy John surgery. It doesn’t seem fair to an organization that basically has been building toward 2014 since Sandy Alderson arrived as GM in the fall of 2010.
But then again, considering that Alderson said he was aware Harvey had been dealing with forearm tightness in recent weeks, it’s fair to wonder why the Mets didn’t act sooner.
“Forearm tightness is usually the first sign of an elbow problem,” a former major league pitcher said by phone on Monday. “If he was getting treatment on it, I can’t believe they didn’t do an MRI earlier.”
It also seemed curious that Terry Collins said he wasn’t aware Harvey had been getting treatment for the forearm tightness. Weren’t the Mets supposed to have solved the injury follies that haunted them in recent years?
Finally, as SNY analyst Bob Ojeda noted, if Harvey had any forearm issue, someone should have at least stopped him from throwing so many sliders.
Yes, there is plenty of room for second-guessing here, which only makes it more painful for Met fans, who finally had reason to feel their time was coming.
The cruel reality is that there is no sure way of predicting or preventing injuries to young pitchers, no matter how much baseball people obsess over innings limits these days. It’s just that Matt Harvey had an aura about him that made you think he would be immune to such human frailty.
For one thing, he was the Dark Knight and all that. As macho as they come when he takes the rubber.
Perhaps more significantly, scouts said he had the cleanest delivery you could ever hope for from a power pitcher. So it wasn’t only the Mets who were stunned by the news that Harvey has a ligament tear in his elbow.“With (Stephen) Strasburg’s delivery, you could see it coming,’’ one NL scout said on Monday. “But Harvey, he was so free and easy, and he always looked like he was on time with that delivery, so even though he was a max-effort guy, he wasn’t putting extra stress on his arm.
“It just tells you the arm isn’t built to withstand the torque of throwing 98 miles per hour. Too bad, though. Man, I love watching that kid pitch.’’
Yes, there was something about Harvey’s intensity, his attack mentality, that resonated with people, from the casual fan to the most hardened observer.
More than that, he was the new Seaver, the new Gooden — like them, too electrifying for even the baseball gods to stand in the way of another winning era in Queens that would finally put an end to all the recent misery around the Mets.
Only now he’s probably headed for Tommy John surgery. It doesn’t seem fair to an organization that basically has been building toward 2014 since Sandy Alderson arrived as GM in the fall of 2010.
But then again, considering that Alderson said he was aware Harvey had been dealing with forearm tightness in recent weeks, it’s fair to wonder why the Mets didn’t act sooner.
“Forearm tightness is usually the first sign of an elbow problem,” a former major league pitcher said by phone on Monday. “If he was getting treatment on it, I can’t believe they didn’t do an MRI earlier.”
It also seemed curious that Terry Collins said he wasn’t aware Harvey had been getting treatment for the forearm tightness. Weren’t the Mets supposed to have solved the injury follies that haunted them in recent years?
Finally, as SNY analyst Bob Ojeda noted, if Harvey had any forearm issue, someone should have at least stopped him from throwing so many sliders.
Yes, there is plenty of room for second-guessing here, which only makes it more painful for Met fans, who finally had reason to feel their time was coming.
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