Matt Harvey’s Injury And “The Plan”

This is an old song, but Met fans are conditioned. “Hope for the best, expect the worst,” goes the mantra, at least since Carlos Beltran stapled a bat to his shoulder in October, 2006. We all knew this one was too good to last, didn’t we? Matt Harvey – the bellwether of the young pitching staff, the advance guard, the herald that was serving notice to the rest of baseball that the Mets were coming, baby, so you’d better be ready – has been diagnosed with a partial UCL tear in his pitching arm and will likely require Tommy John surgery. He had been pitching so well, comparisons were made to a young Tom Seaver, and not just in athletic ability. There was a famous Sports Illustrated article, extolling the virtues of his near-flawless motion, almost an iron-clad guarantee against arm trouble. He came right over the top. None of this “inverted ‘W’ business – that which will more than likely sideline Zack Wheeler at some point – for Matt Harvey, thank you very much. The mechanics, the body type, the poise…all ideal traits in this young pitcher.

And he got hurt.

Terry Collins, Sandy Alderson, Harvey, the rest of the team and the fans received cold comfort from Dr. Frank Jobe, the man who invented the TJ procedure: “Sometimes, this stuff just happens.” Despite the pathological need for human beings to assign blame in a situation like this, there is no easy scapegoat to be found here. Collins and Alderson had gone to great pains all season long to harness Harvey’s natural inclination to just pitch, man. It wasn’t like they left him out there to throw 134 pitches for a shot at history. It wasn’t that they were trying to extend a World Series to a Game 6. There was nothing untoward that would have led to the swelling of Harvey’s forearm. For the philosophically or metaphysically thinking among us, this latest round of bad luck – an updated version of the ‘60s lament “same ol’ Mets” – can only be penance for picking Seaver out of a hat, for Ron Swoboda’s catch, for the ball-on-the-wall play, for Bill Buckner, for the last month of the 1999 season. If you think about it, the Mets, up through 2006, have had a more than “normal” – i.e. “non-Yankee” – share of good luck. In the aftermath of the Harvey news, it takes every fiber of this Met fan’s being to wax so philosophically and it’s hard to listen to even a respected scribe try and talk us off the ledge. As someone on Twitter said yesterday, “Hey, Baseball Gods, that’s a **** move.”

The main takeaway from all this, of course, is that now “the plan” needs to shift. All season long – a look-see year in which all positions other than starting pitcher were to be evaluated so off-season resources could be optimally allocated – we fans were told to look to next year, the year when it would all coalesce. In the wake of Harvey’s forearm, all the hope that had been revving up for 2014 must now be funneled to no earlier than 2015, thus buying the Wilpons time to reorganize their finances yet again and retain control of the franchise. This will give them another excuse to squeeze that nickel until Thomas Jefferson screams: why spend money to try and contend when the biggest, most prominent cog in the machine will be missing? So 2014 will see David Wright come off his own injury a year older and no closer to the post-season than he was in 2009, another prime year drowned in a sea of misfortune and frugality. It’s a shame that Wright will be thought of the same way as Ernie Banks or Ralph Kiner: a Hall-worthy player who never got a chance at a ring.

There’s the plan, in pieces.

Follow me on Twitter @CharlieHangley

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