As if the Mets needed anything else to go wrong, their season got even worse last night when they learned that David Wright is a long way from returning to the field.
The third baseman was told he won’t be able to resume any baseball activity for at least three more weeks after seeing spine specialist Dr. Patrick O’Leary at the Hospital for Special Surgery yesterday.
“It’s obviously bad news,” Wright said after last night’s 6-3 loss to the Braves at Citi Field.
Despite Wright not getting an X-ray and being asymptomatic, the doctor told him that the fracture hadn’t started to heal until after being shelved with the injury.
The Mets had hoped that Wright had begun healing immediately after suffering the injury on April 19 against Houston when he tried to tag Carlos Lee at third base, but doctors determined that didn’t happen until he stopped playing. Wright, who has been on the disabled list since May 16, likely won’t be able to do anything until late June, at the earliest.
“I was a little surprised by the result,” general manager Sandy Alderson said. “I had hoped if David had been asymptomatic he would be cleared for baseball activity, but the doctor felt — and rightly so — that this is something that needs time to heal and typical time frame for that is around six weeks.”
And, of course, there remains concern that this could be an injury that lingers even longer — but Wright remained hopeful it wouldn’t.
“Although I’m disappointed, at some point I guess you have to understand the doctors’ point of view and everybody’s point of view except mine, that you can’t rush this thing back and risk missing a year just for another couple of weeks to let this thing heal up the way it’s supposed to,” Wright said.
He added that the news would not prevent him from doing the same core exercises he’s been doing of late.
“I’m moving forward with my rehab, so it wasn’t a setback,” Wright said. “It was bad news. I was going there hoping that at least soon I was going to be able to start baseball stuff. It doesn’t look like that’s gonna be the case, but the rehab program is still [happening] on a daily basis; still gradually moving up that ladder.”
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that the prognosis for this injury keeps getting worse. After initially wondering whether he would go on the disabled list at all, the Mets certainly didn’t anticipate him being out until the All-Star break.
Alderson tried to use some humor to lighten the mood last night, but it showed just how unknown the Mets’ future is, in more ways than one.
“Maybe we’ll have David back for [Johan] Santana’s first start — you never know,” Alderson said.
Apparently, you don’t.
Instead of an X-ray, got what he called “a physical kind of examination. They did some things try to trigger it to see how different stretches and different activities effect it.”
And though those tests didn’t result in any setbacks, it was determined that he needed more time to heal.
“You can only argue so much when a spine specialist tells you do something,” said Wright, adding his hope of coming back in three weeks initially may have been “wishful thinking.”
“With this type of injury, both [O’Leary and Dr. Robert Watkins, who Wright saw last week in California] said it was a common fracture in a very uncommon place,” Wright said. “There’s not a lot of cases where you can go back to how see how long it takes. . . . I don’t want to do something further and miss even more time, and then you’re talking about big chunks of time.”
They already are.