Once Again, Injuries Have Taken Center Stage In Ruining New York Mets’ Season

There may not be enough cliches to describe how ridiculously unlucky the New York Mets have been with injuries over the past few years. After weathering an insane amount of injuries to get through the past two seasons, things have caught up with the Mets in 2017, burying them in the standings with just over a month of baseball to go. Spotrac.com’s calculations show that the Mets have lost the second most payroll to players on the disabled list this season, behind only the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the eighth most player games to injury. The latter figure should continue to rise as the Mets will be without Steven Matz, Zack Wheeler, Michael Conforto, and presumably Yoenis Cespedes for the remainder of the season.

While the Mets have had their share of bad luck with injuries, like watching Conforto dislocate his shoulder and tear a capsule in it by simply swinging a bat, they have also created plenty of their own misfortune. Several players, including Cespedes and Noah Syndergaard, have admitted that they didn’t train properly for the season. The Mets have seemingly dealt with more muscle pulls and strains than almost everyone else in the league, and bad training techniques can play a huge role in that. We’ve beaten this issue to death several times, but until the Mets realize they need to overall their training and medical staff they will continue to see their seasons derailed by injury problems.

All of the injuries have left the Mets with quite possibly the worst active roster in baseball outside of the Philadelphia Phillies. The every day lineup now looks like the group you would send to a road game in spring training, with Asdrubal Cabrera being the only player left from the Opening Day group. The rotation is in shambles, with only Jacob deGrom and Robert Gsellman left from the Mets’ seven original starters. deGrom has somehow avoided the disabled list for the entire season, which is a minor miracle given the Mets’ health problems, so Mets’ fans should knock on wood and throw salt over their shoulders every time he pitches for the rest of the season.

The sad thing is that the injuries completely ruined a team that had every chance to be a World Series contender at the beginning of the season. Without Conforto and Cespedes in the lineup, the Mets will essentially be unwatchable on days when deGrom isn’t pitching. The final month of the season will feature plenty of young players trying to earn a place on the 2018 roster, but the losses should keep mounting simply due to the sheer amount of talent the Mets have lost over the past few months. While that is good for the farm system down the line, it will be a rough month for the players to get through.