The Clouds Of Perception

If there’s one thing I noticed in the ensuing frustration surrounding Zack Wheeler’s injury and Sandy Alderson defense of the way the Mets handled him, it’s this: The people that cover this team day in and day out … the local guys … are all over the Mets for this. While people on the outside looking in are more reasonable, with the general thought of “hey … it sucks, but it happens.”

Metsmerized had a recap of the beat writers’ reactions, all pretty much killing the Mets and Alderson. Bob Klapisch’s take particularly peaked my interest:

But once again, the Mets make it hard to trust them. No one said a word this winter about Wheeler’s chronic pain. Was it because it was time to hustle season tickets? Was it because a potential setback to one of their prized young arms would sabotage the sales pitch? Is that the reason Alderson never pulled the trigger on a trade for Dillon Gee, because he privately feared this day was coming?

Then you have the reactions from the outside forces, particularly Grant Brisbee at SB Nation:

There aren’t a lot of lols to be had anywhere. Another young pitcher broke. We’ll have another season without several of the more intriguing, watchable arms in baseball. It stinks. It’s something close to an epidemic. It’s something teams will have to address, and it’s something the league should investigate. In this one case, though, it doesn’t have to mean a thing other than the obvious. Zack Wheeler can’t pitch, and that’s an awful turn of events. Anything more than that is a partially educated guess, at best.

Now the most interesting perspective of all came from Will Carroll, the “injury expert”, who was on High Heat today and not only exonerated the Mets in their handling of Wheeler, but said that he expected Matt Harvey to be back on the operating table in 5-6 years because he’s doing the same things in his delivery that he was doing before the injury.

So who is right here? Should the Mets be hammered? Or is this nothing more than dumb luck? Well … yes. Now the qualifier is that when a beat guy makes asks a provocative question like whether the Mets held back injury information to “hustle season tickets”, you always wonder whether this is for page views and back links. But when seemingly everyone in the area blasts you for a lack of transparency if nothing else (and that seems to be the bigger issue than the actual handling of the injury), then it means your repuation precedes you. And the Mets do have a reputation for having a lack of transparency (finances) and for communication awkwardness (the New Yorker article). So how do you expect these local scribes to react? They’ve seen it all on this team and with this ownership.

As for everyone else, they’re right too. When MRI’s come back clean, there’s not much you can do. And it isn’t like other teams haven’t been affected by pitchers tearing their UCL’s at younger and younger ages. It does mean that the whole “Prevention and Recovery” deal was nothing more than getting everybody off their backs. “Look! The Mets are being proactive!” Please. Nothing can prevent these kinds of injuries once a kid gets to the major leagues if you’re not careful with this kid at a young age. Hell, Wheeler apparently also had a torn tendon, which is the injury equivalent of “don’t argue that Throneberry touched second … because he didn’t touch first either. (Though it’s certainly an argument for the local guys’ point of view.)

And would changing Matt Harvey’s delivery help him avoid Dr. Andrews in six years? Perhaps. But if you change Matt Harvey’s delivery, is he still Matt Harvey?

I don’t know the answers to the questions, but I found the split in perception interesting. Whoever you believe is right, it unfortunately doesn’t change the fact that Zack Wheeler won’t be taking a mound anytime soon. And that .. as a good man once said … stinks.