Please use this thread all week to discuss any Mets-specific topic you wish.
Over at SNY is the following headline: “Terry Collins says former Mets pitcher Matt Harvey talked about suicide.” The article is linked – you can read it yourself. Sounds like a throwaway line, more than anything delivered with real intent. Regardless of Harvey’s state of mind at the time – was it okay for Collins to disclose this information in 2022? Once you tell someone something personal – whether to your parents or clergy or friends or manager – it’s probably wise not to expect that person not to tell someone at some point. And it’s not like Collins immediately told someone else. In the 24/7 news cycle – this is ancient history. Maybe the imaginary statute of limitations in this case has already passed.
It just struck me as odd that Collins would say this publicly.
Perpetual dumpster fire, Matt Harvey, apparently appeared in court today and admitted to distribution the opioids that Tyler Skaggs ultimately died from.
What a loser.
Harvey Day! Playoffs and WS! The guy was a stud. They abused him when he came back from TJ and lost an ace who might have led them to more Playoffs and WSs.
As many of you may recall, I was probably Matt Harvey’s biggest fan on here. Was always waiting for and rooting for his comeback, even after he left Queens. I find this so very disappointing. Now I guess he’ll be lumped together with Gooden and Strawberry. Wasted potential. A shooting star that burned out too quickly. I always felt bad for him with the injuries. I knew he liked to party, knew he was arrogant, but I never thought he had a drug problem. I agree with Brian that Terry Collins had no business sharing those intimate details with the media. It’s not like he was on trial. I wonder how well known this was. Did Sandy know or at least suspect? Is this part of why a lot of teammates seemed to not like him? Was Harvey’s famous nosebleed caused by cocaine use?
Chris F – I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Harvey may have shared a few Percocets – painkillers anyone whose ever had surgery has gotten. I’ve gotten them for root canal. Skaggs died from snorting Fentanyl -the same deadly crap that killed Prince and Michael Jackson and so many others. Harvey is a lot of things, but he’s not responsible for Skagg’s OD. Eric Kay, on the other hand, who was known to supply drugs to Skaggs repeatedly, deserves to go to prison. Here I go, defending Harvey again.
Young men with great talent get rich in their 20’s… get exposed to drugs… some become addicted. Calling it “partying” is misleading. These are young men trying to fill a void. We can trace the origins of that void, but why can some people keep their tiller steady and others lose their compass?
This is not a sports question per se… weaker individuals cost themselves and society every day… this society is not an easy place to navigate. In a perfect world, we would detect the vulnerable to take steps to help them… overpaying our athletes is a double-edged sword.
I think of Josh Hamilton who might have been one of the all-time greats if he hadn’t gotten messed up with drugs. In his biography, he talks about the boredom of the minors and how he used to deal with that by getting tattoos. In time the guys doing the tats got him into drugs and, except for a few years, his career was a disaster. It seems to me that there are many reasons for using drugs. For Hamilton, it was boredom. For others, it might be a sense of invincibility, for yet others a way to deal with insecurities as Wobbit rightly noted. I wonder if, for Harvey, it was a compulsion to have as much fun as he could. Sadly, when you live for that kind of fun, you can never find perpetual satisfaction and it eventually eats you alive.
Reading all of the thoughts above bring me back to Matt Harvey and how his promising career has now just about been closed. Between the decreased fastball, the lack of pitching success and the drug use information, it will be hard for a team to give him any rope. Harvey is already 32 and getting back to MLB quality after all this blows over will be difficult. The best I can hope for him is to become a voice for MLB and to use this terrible death and its fallouts to help other young athletes cope with success and the pitfalls. MLB and MLBPA have to jointly have a better monitoring and mentoring system.
The NFL has a counseling program for all its younger players and I’d like to see MLB develop one also. If there was knowledge within the Mets that Harvey had a problem, a good and strong organization would have done something.
As for Collins, I have always called him Bozo the Manager for how he seemed to screw up games routinely, but hey Fred Wilpon owned the team and they hung out together so… However, I was fooled into thinking that he seemed to be a good person. But now, he has surpassed his clown identity and is squarely in Loser territory. Whether it’s a mental fart or an attention seeking opportunity that motivated him to go to every open microphone and throw dirt on Harvey, he is the one deserving ridicule, not Matt Harvey. Harvey had more respect for how he spoke about others. Collins should just go away, but I doubt he has the dignity to do it on his own.