Amid this still freezing Hot Stove season, did the Mets establish a television milestone this past week?
Has a professional sports team ever before placed its medical and strength-training personnel on its own network?
That you could find Jim Cavallini and Mike Barwis alongside Sandy Alderson answering questions Thursday night on SNY’s “Mets Hot Stove,” spoke to how prevalent and public the issue of the Mets’ medical management has become.
In the wake of last year’s injury-fueled disaster, the team’s general manager, Alderson, joined Barwis, the senior advisor for strength and conditioning, and Cavallini, the newly hired director of performance and sports science, to present a unified front and a recommitment to their players’ good health and productivity.
Kudos to the Mets for welcoming the elephant to the room then putting it on a TV couch. However, if they are finally going to change their reputation as baseball’s equivalent of Dr. Nick Riviera from “The Simpsons,” it’ll take more than a renovation of their personnel.
They require a culture transfusion, and that must start at the very top.
Conversations with 10 people possessing first-hand knowledge of the Mets’ baseball operations produced the picture of an ultra-intense environment, created by Mets ownership, in which the daily pressure to win, not only the games but the daily media coverage, has compromised the decision-making process and, hence, led to poor moves on multiple fronts. On the medical front, that has made the Mets the butt of many an industry joke.
Look, some of the negativity surrounding the Mets’ mishaps can be overstated. When Neil Walker and Robert Gsellman suffer hamstring injuries within a couple of weeks of each other, that’s just bad luck. Same goes for Michael Conforto’s left shoulder trauma that will likely sideline him for Opening Day.
Noah Syndergaard showed up last year with too much muscle on his upper frame? Gary Sanchez reported to Yankees camp last year with extra muscle that, the club believes, led to his defensive woes.
The Mets get the most flak not because of their overall quantity of injuries — their 6,910 games lost to injury since 2010 place them sixth overall, per the website ManGamesLost.com — but rather because of a recurring pattern of incidents that has left scores of jaws agape, and that pre-dates Alderson’s Citi Field employment. File these incidents under the “What were they thinking?!” category.
What were the Mets thinking when they allowed Syndergaard to take the mound last April 30, three days after missing a start with right biceps tendinitis, after he refused to take an MRI exam? Syndergaard then partially tore his lat and put himself out of action for more than five months.
What were the Mets thinking four days prior to that when they put Cespedes back in the lineup after his ailing left hamstring sidelined him for three games and five days, rather than let him rest another five days (or more) on the 10-day disabled list? In his second game back, Cespedes aggravated the ailment while legging out a double and wound up missing more than six weeks.
Last year’s horror double-feature, in the season’s first month, evoked memories of previously confounding behavior in plain sight.
* Jose Reyes, whom the Mets just re-signed for the 2018 season, has starred in two such dramas. In 2004, he admitted feeling pain as he tried to play through what turned out to be a fractured left fibula. Five years later, Reyes took a mere five-day break in May with a right calf injury, pinch-hitting once during that span, and wound up going down for the year in his second game back.
* Also in 2009, Carlos Beltran removed himself from action after playing for about a month on an ailing right knee. That led to his well-publicized dispute with Mets management about getting the knee surgically repaired in January 2010.
* Remember Ryan Church’s concussion adventures in 2008? He suffered his first such head injury on March 1 of that year and a second one on May 20. The Mets used him as a pinch-hitter in a May 22 game, then flew him from Atlanta to Colorado, where he pinch hit twice in three days, and then went from Colorado back to New York. He wound up going on the disabled list twice and played just two more seasons before his career ended at age 32.
* They carried different contexts — more understandable, you might argue — but you can throw in Johan Santana’s legendary 134-pitch no-hitter in 2012 and Matt Harvey’s 216 innings pitched in 2015, after throwing zero in 2014, as aggressive maneuvers after which Santana was never the same and Harvey hasn’t been yet.
In these instances, multiple sources said, the Mets prioritized the sprint over the marathon. They deferred to their players’ positive self-assessments, or they didn’t find the right test to supplement everyone else’s eye test, or some mixture of the two led to disaster.
Several sources attribute the Mets’ faulty decision-making behavior to various factors. One is the organization feeling the heat of competing with the major leagues’ titans, the Yankees, for attention in the market with a payroll a fraction of the size and consequently less roster depth.
Another is an environment where CEO Fred Wilpon and COO Jeff Wilpon both are prone to micromanagement, with Fred Wilpon more likely to assert himself in on-the-field decisions and Jeff Wilpon more involved in medical matters — such as working on media releases about injuries — clouding the chain of command.
Can all of this disappear now with what the team calls its “overhaul”? The Mets, through a spokesman, directed The Post to the comments made by Alderson, Barwis and Cavallini in Thursday’s SNY broadcast.
“We recognize that we had some shortcomings in the performance area,” Alderson said on the show. He mentioned the importance of “anticipating problems, rather than reacting to them,” and said the organization would take a more “holistic” approach to players’ health.
Cavallini, who carries an impressive résumé of having worked the past eight years for the U.S. Army, spoke of “optimizing our players’ readiness.”
If these were platitudes, they were platitudes you want to hear if you’re a Mets fan. The more science you can deploy in monitoring your players, the more data you can utilize in making good decisions — and the more comprehensive approach you take to treatment — the better.
In addition, new manager Mickey Callaway is more in tune with modern pitcher-deployment practices — and the accompanying technology — than his predecessor Terry Collins. Callaway and his new pitching coach Dave Eiland, who has World Series rings from the 2009 Yankees and the 2015 Royals, have monitored the Mets’ pitchers far more closely this offseason than in the recent past. Though there’s a consensus that longtime head trainer Ray Ramirez was fired to serve red meat to angry fans rather than for poor performance, his replacement, Brian Chicklo, has a good reputation.
If a pitcher tries to push his way into a start this year without undergoing an MRI, the Mets are saying with their actions and words, he will not be allowed to do so. The culture, they promise, has changed.
The proof, of course, will come as the 2018 season unfolds. When the Mets face inevitable adversity, how will they respond?
The beauty of this situation is, we’ll all find out together. If you see an achy Met on the field and wonder, “What are they thinking?!” then you’ll know this transfusion didn’t take. And just like with any organization’s culture, you’ll know where the change still needs to occur.