What This Means for Matt Harvey and other Young Pitchers

I know I mentioned that I would write about Baltimore today. That can wait. 

Matt Harvey has a tear in his elbow. He was shocked to find hear about a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament, as tests showed. He is unlikely to pitch again this year, and will most likely not return for the 2014 season. Harvey says that he’ll do everything he can to avoid surgery, but if he does need it, he’ll have Tommy John surgery. 

Tommy John, as you might know, is the worst surgery for a pitcher to have, and sometimes can kill a pitcher’s career. The surgery generally requires a year recovery time, meaning that Harvey would miss almost all of 2014.

This might be the worst news in baseball all year. It’s the biggest blow that the Mets could have possibly imagined, and it looks like their idea of building around Harvey might come to an end.

The Mets are 58-71, and 19.5 games out of first place. They’re done for the season, that’s obvious. They have struggled mostly because of their offense, even with veteran talent in David Wright and Marlon Byrd. They have a team .238 batting average (29^th in MLB), a .681 OPS (29^th in MLB). Their pitching, however, was quite different. Led by young prospects Harvey and Zach Wheeler, the team had a combined 3.75 ERA and a 1.29 WHIP (11^th and 12^th in MLB, respectively). 

Harvey led the team in ERA (2.27), wins (9), and leads the NL with 191 strikeouts. He also had a 5.6 WAR and an NL best .4 home runs allowed per nine innings. Harvey started for the NL in the all-star game, and is most known for his hard fastball.

Pitchers that usually dominate on their fastballs tend to have surgeries like Tommy John. Notable pitchers that have had Tommy John are Kerry Wood, John Smoltz, Stephen Strasburg, Adam Wainwright, Joe Nathan, Billy Wagner, Tim Hudson, Josh Johnson, Chris Carpenter, and, of course, Tommy John.  

I hope to God that Harvey recovers as well as Stephen Strasburg, Adam Wainwright, and even Kerry Wood did, and not fall like Josh Johnson or Chris Carpenter. If anything, if he winds up like Adam Wainwright, you would want him to have Tommy John, Mets fans. In 2009, Wainwright went 19-8 with a 2.63 ERA. In 2010, he went 20-11 with a 2.42 ERA.

Then he was sidelined for the entire 2011 season with the surgery (ironically, the Cardinals would go on to win the World Series that year). He was ok in 2012, going 14-13 with a 3.94 ERA, but now is back to his old stuff. Wainwright is now 15-7 with a 2.58 ERA, has five complete games (two of them shutouts), and has a career best (and absurd) 7.28 K/BB ratio.

 

If you had to look at the closest example relating to Harvey, it would probably be Kerry Wood. Wood had his surgery right after his amazing Rookie season, where he won Rookie of the Year (he even beat Todd Helton in the voting). This was also the year where he struck out twenty batters in a complete game one-hitter, which is said to be one of the greatest games ever pitched. When he returned from injury, he was never as good as he was in 1998, and put up a 3.71 ERA with 1349 K’s in the rest of his career. 

It’s basically a coin flip to see if Harvey will return as well as he did. He will most likely need surgery, that’s just the truth. To makes things worse for the organization, pitcher Jeremy Hefner will also need Tommy John surgery. Teams need to watch this with their young pitchers. They might need to do what Washington did with Strasburg and shut down the pitchers. That’s what the Marlins are going to do with Jose Fernandez. It’s heartbreaking to baseball, and I hope for the best of him and the Mets in the future. Hopefully Tommy John happens a lot less in the future as it does today.

Email me at statsbuddy42@gmail.com for any questions/comments/concerns.

-Evan Boyd