There are injuries that make perfect sense, because we can see them: Joe Theismann’s leg snapping like a twig on Monday Night Football; part of Tim Krumrie’s leg going one way and the rest going the other in Super Bowl XXII; Kevin Ware rising to contest a 3-point jumper, then falling in a sickening heap.
There are injuries that we can understand, because by nature sports can be dangerous: the sprinter who blows out his hamstring. The quarterback whose brain is bruised by a vicious sack. The running back struggling for extra yards whose knee is rendered into oatmeal because of a late tackle.
But a pitcher’s arm …
“Everyone thinks good mechanics prevent arm injury,” Tweeted former pitcher Mark Mulder, who himself saw his career derailed by his million-dollar left arm. “Doesn’t matter people. Either you get lucky or you don’t.”
Matt Harvey officially falls into that second category now, after spending so much of the past year in that rare place athletes always crave: at the top of their profession, on top of the world, young and invulnerable and bulletproof.
Until you slide into an MRI tube one morning at the Hospital for Special Surgery, your arm achy but not wracked with pain, safe in your innocence and your naivete that the doctors will find a little tendinitis, maybe suggest skipping a start or two.
Until the news comes back as something else.
“Obviously,” Harvey said late Monday afternoon, “this was the last thing I was expecting when I went in this morning.”
It was certainly the last thing the Mets needed to hear, the progressive roll call of a cruel vocabulary. Two awful words: partial tear. Three awful words: Ulnar collateral ligament. Four awful words: Tommy John Surgery possible.
“Not good news, obviously,” Mets GM Sandy Alderson said.
Not for the Mets, who have spent five years trying to spin their way out of a baseball black hole, and not for Alderson, who has pledged for months that 2014 would mark a grand return to contention. Not for Mets fans, who must never feel more jinxed than they do right now, watching this jewel of a prospect damaged like this. And certainly not for Harvey, who learned the terrible truth that all it takes for your life to turn upside down is to slide into an MRI tube.
“If I can avoid surgery, I will,” he said, hopefully, if somewhat unconvincingly. Maybe that would be for the best, maybe not. It is a pitcher’s arm, after all: fragile, mysterious and utterly, frustratingly, unpredictable.
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