Matt Harvey (PHOTO: Brad PennerUSA TODAY Sports)
The news that Matt Harvey tore his ulnar collateral ligament came as a crushing blow to the Mets and their fans. Though the club sits 13 games below .500, it appeared set to contend within the next couple of seasons due to an impressive arsenal of young starting pitchers highlighted by a bona fide ace in Harvey.
Harvey says he’s going to try to avoid Tommy John surgery, but there stands a reasonable chance he will miss the entire 2014 season and render his team significantly less likely to compete next year.
Many in the team’s fan base and media are angry about it, and plenty want to assign blame. It’s a very common reaction to awful news: With crystal clear hindsight, find a definitive scapegoat to flog for some vague indiscretion.
Some say Mets manager Terry Collins should be fired for leaning too hard on Harvey, even if Harvey seems like the type of guy who demands the ball on short rest, a dude that pitches while bleeding from the face and stands up to massive clubhouse bullies.
Collins twice let the 24-year-old fireballer throw more than 120 pitches in a start, but here are Harvey’s combined stats for the two starts he made immediately after those 121-pitch performances: 16 innings, four hits, no walks, no runs, 22 strikeouts — arguably his two most dominant outings of the season. If Collins overworked Harvey, Harvey had a funny way of showing it.
Similar cases have been made against pitching coach Dan Warthen and general manager Sandy Alderson, mostly by those who already wanted them fired and are citing Harvey’s injury as evidence of mismanagement or poor judgment or whatever other fireable offense they can name. Some even, somehow, blamed Harvey’s nude photos in ESPN the Magazine’s body issue.
But it’s none of those things. It’s bum luck and a terrible reminder that no one has really figured out how to prevent pitchers from getting hurt. Besides Harvey himself, no one is more invested in Harvey’s health than his manager, his pitching coach and his team’s front office. How could anyone think that men who ascended to those positions in Major League Baseball would callously disregard a potential injury to one of the best pitchers in the sport?
(PHOTO: Steve Mitchell/USA TODAY Sports)
Pitchers get hurt because pitching is not natural. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to figure out how to avoid or mitigate pitcher injuries, and it doesn’t mean teams can’t be better or worse than their competitors at doing so. But there’s not a ton of evidence to suggest any of the great lengths to which teams already go to try to prevent them reliably work.
Working backwards to find a bugaboo to blame for Harvey’s injury is a fool’s errand. The team capped his innings last year and planned to do so again in 2013 to try to keep him healthy, and every person in the organization wanted him opening 2014 on the mound. But it happens, and it happened.
It doesn’t actually rule the Mets out for 2014, and it doesn’t mean they’re wrong to be stockpiling young pitching. Teams bulk up on starting pitching precisely because of how frequently pitchers get hurt. It’s just an awful shame when it happens to one that’s so good.
