Matt Harvey being shut down with a partially-torn UCL is awful, awful news. I know now the official line is that they will wait and see how it goes, think about rehab over surgery and all of that, but really: when was the last time a pitcher successfully rehabbed a torn-UCL? It seems like they always end up having surgery.
So, as we contemplate being without Matt Harvey for a year -- and not to full strength until the beginning of the 2015 season -- let’s talk about the blame game. Because you know people will be doing so soon.
Except, I’m struggling to think of who should get blame. We may hear sourced-reports about this later, but I can’t recall anyone with knowledge of Harvey’s health and condition saying that the Mets were mishandling him. Overworking him. Ignoring signs of fatigue. His workload hasn’t gone up in dramatic fashion from one year to the next (which is part of the somewhat dubious “Verducci Effect” theory). He’s had a handful of outings this season where he began innings after already over 100 pitches and topped 120 a couple of times, but no one ever said that 100 pitches was some magic number. Indeed, smarter thinking these days is that you have to watch pitchers individually for signs of fatigue rather than arbitrarily assigning the same pitch count to a horse like Harvey as you might a slight curveball artist.
No, Harvey getting shut down and likely needing surgery doesn’t appear to be a matter of the Mets abusing Harvey or some awful mechanical flaw. It’s just a matter of pitching living to break your heart. Maybe someday there will be a viable theory that predicts and can help prevent elbow injuries in pitchers, but for now it just feels like chaos and sadness. A chaos and a sadness that seems to have visited Mets pitching prospects in disproportionate fashion over the years.