When Mariano Rivera crumpled on the warning track in Kansas City last year in early May, his ACL torn, the natural reactions arrived:
How horrible for Rivera. How terrible for the Yankees. How will they ever replace him?
But there is something even more powerful with special players like this — sadness for the game. There are a lot of pitches and swings and innings in a long season, and there are a handful of players who can break the monotony, can evoke passion and energy and greater interest with their mere presence over the six months, make the endless stream of games seem far less so.
Just the chords of “Enter Sandman” have done that with Rivera. Enlivened the proceedings, invigorated spirits. And then he starts throwing cutters and it is Springsteen breaking into “Born to Run” — familiar yet revitalizing all at once. Brilliance never gets old.
And here was that sadness cast on the whole darn sport again yesterday with the revelation that Matt Harvey has a torn ulnar collateral ligament and that there is now a pretty good chance we will next see his fastball in 2015.
Yes, of course, there is pity for a kid being derailed so early. There is despair for Met fans, who just were making out the light at the end of a very long tunnel. And, naturally, there is wonder if in that bevy of Mets pitching prospects here and near, there is one person or some combination that can capably compensate for the loss of an ace.
Yet, selfishly, the strongest reaction is that sadness, the loss of something precious not just from a team and a fan base, but for a whole sport. The exit of a No. 1 — with a bullet.
So quickly Harvey had elevated to an event — Happy Harvey Day. A welcome Matt in that long season.
We can talk of loving the ballet of a well-turned double play and the nuanced excellence of a hit and run orchestrated with timing and skill. But the flame that attracts us most to baseball is power. Whether it is coming from Babe Ruth’s bat or Sandy Koufax’s arm.
Think about it. The fandom never seems to care much that a speedster has used illegal performance enhancers, only that a sense of historic power has been disturbed and distorted by usage. The concern is about tainting Maris and Aaron, not about whether Rickey Henderson’s all-time steal marks could be under assault.
Harvey brandished power, unique power, make-even-major-league-hitters-look-helpless kind of power, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-of-it power. Among pitchers qualified for this year’s ERA title, Harvey (according to data at Fangraphs) has the highest average velocity on his fastball, slider and curveball, and his changeup is fourth best. In 2013, more than anyone else, Matt Harvey defined pitching heat.
And when it was all working, he was a virtuoso of menace — hard, harder, hardest. He forced you to watch, he made the monotony vanish. He made the Mets relevant — at least once every five days — and himself a star with the same speed he offered from 60 feet, 6 inches.
Now?
Now we go through all the various stages of grieving and evaluating. We abandon our sense of modernity and ponder if the Mets are actually, of all things, hexed. We think about supernovas such as Mark Prior and mull just how nasty of a thing throwing a baseball hard is, and how it can turn genius to ex-genius with hardly a pause.
Harvey talked boldly about trying to avoid Tommy John surgery and the Mets left opened that possibility. But the vast majority of pitchers who incur a partial UCL tear need the scalpel and then the 12-14-month rehab phase. With the elbow as opposed to, say, Johan Santana’s shoulder, there is a well-prescribed roadmap back to full health, full ability and — particularly important in this case — full velocity.
But what goes slow — even when you have done everything as fast as Harvey — is the time. In this likely scenario, the Mets play 2014 without their most important player and the sport is deprived of hard, harder, hardest; our need for speed less fulfilled.
Poor kid. Poor Mets. Poor us.
Sadness.
joel.sherman@nypost.com