With the future success of the Mets leaning so much on Matt Harvey, the team had been very careful with the ace this season, including putting a 200-inning cap on him. Due to a torn ulnar collateral ligament he didn't make it past 178.1 innings, but his agent Scott Boras doesn't believe the Mets mistreated the 24-year-old phenom.
"With his age, and he's a power pitcher and the whole thing, this is a very normal course for a major leaguer," Boras said, according to ESPN New York. "It's how you develop players. There's nothing on that front that I think is an issue at all."
Harvey was enjoying a Cy Young caliber year, with a 9-5 record and a 2.27 ERA in 26 starts this season with a league-leading 191 strikeouts before news broke Monday that he's done for the season and may possibly need Tommy John surgery.
Harvey, who started the All-Star game for the National League at Citi Field this past July in his first full season, discussed the injury Monday. The video can be viewed below:
The Mets had done everything they could to protect Harvey, with manager Terry Collins telling him to dull down his velocity on his fastballs at times to induce more ground ball outs rather than having him rear back and try and blow high 90 mph pitches by hitters. General manager Sandy Alderson even installed an innings limit for Harvey, making sure he didn't go over 210 innings this season.
Still, injuries are an unfortunate part of the game no matter how careful managers are with pitchers, as is the case with Harvey and Washington Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg, who underwent Tommy John surgery in 2010 after suffering a similar tear in his UCL.
Boras insists the Mets aren't at fault due to the injury, and agrees with Harvey on waiting to see if there are any other options besides the surgery to fix the tear.
"When you're talking about the term 'partial tear,' you're talking about 5 percent to 95 percent," Boras explained, according to SNY. "You have to get in and get the specifics and get more information medically before we can really make a determination as to what we're dealing with."
Harvey was soaring in New York this season, and if anyone knows about taking New York City by storm, it's last year's Cy Young Award winner R.A. Dickey who was traded from the Mets to the Toronto Blue Jays this past offseason.
"It's obviously going to be a terrible loss," Dickey told Newsday's David Lennon prior to Toronto's 7-1 loss at home against the Yankees Tuesday. "And if he has the surgery, he's out for all of next year. It's one thing to try to hang on to a little bit of hope in a dismal season. But it's a whole different animal when you got one of your biggest pieces absent for the attempt at a championship season."
Dickey, who went 20-6 last year with the Mets with a 2.73 ERA and a career-high 230 strikeouts en route to the award, has been having a much more modest campaign this year going 10-11 for Toronto with a 4.39 ERA and 143 strikeouts. He too, doesn't blame the Mets as they know the team did everything they could to protect the young flame thrower.
"I can certainly say having been with Johan [Santana] and some of his injuries, it's a downer. But golly, what can you do? They tried to protect him. I always thought he took care of himself. It's real unfortunate," Dickey said per Newsday.
Dickey and Harvey were teammates briefly when Harvey made his Major League debut late last season and pitched in ten games for the Mets.
It looked as though Harvey was a prime candidate to give the Mets their second-straight Cy Young Award winner, but with the injury and the year Clayton Kershaw is having for the Dodgers, it could be in doubt.
The Mets are looking to be more competitive in 2014, but if Harvey ends up needing the Tommy John surgery, the Mets would be missing a huge piece of their puzzle for 12-18 months, and possibly for the whole season.
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