So it ends as we always feared it might, another season gone, maybe a career, a priceless left arm that should have gone to Cooperstown gone to seed instead.
The Mets acquired Johan Santana in the shadow of an epic collapse, and they lose him for good in the midst of a recovery still too vast to completely comprehend. At the start, he represented what a past Mets administration believed was a final piece to a championship puzzle.
At the end, he departs shrouded in mystery, his shoulder capsule needing a second surgery, the road before him landscaped with uncertainty, the finish likely to come with retirement and certainly outside of the Mets’ employ.
This will be the final scorecard for Santana’s tenure with the Mets: six years, only one of which was a full season, $137.5 million, 109 starts, 46 wins, one ultra-clutch moment and one forever night. The first, in Game 161 of the 2008 season, was precisely the kind of performance for which the Mets acquired Santana, a three-hit masterpiece against the Marlins that provided a temporary stay of a second straight collapse.
The other, of course, was a Friday night last June, a no-hitter that at once closed the lone remaining hole in the Mets’ history, electrified Citi Field … and brought with it an almost immediate sense of doom.
Did those 134 pitches doom him? Was it the impromptu I’ll-show-you bullpen session last month when he stated whipping a baseball a day after his offseason regimen was called into question? Or was it simply the inevitable result of an ordinary-sized man with an extraordinary left arm, who simply reached the quota of abuse nature — and the vocation of pitching — would afford?
We’ll likely never know for sure, and will surely speculate forever. The Mets thought they were getting a final piece when they brought Santana to New York 63 months ago. They thought they were buying a sure thing. And they learned the harsh truth of this game:
You want to make the baseball gods laugh? Tell them about your plans.