Trouble in Flushing for the Mets’ golden boy?
Say it isn’t so. As if things for Mets’ ace Matt Harvery aren’t frustrating enough, with him having to sit out a year to rehab from off season Tommy Johns, now it appears the two are butting heads over where he should rehab–among other things.
Harvey wants to stay close to his team in Manhattan, while the Mets have apparently been keen on keeping him down in Port St. Lucie, where the Mets Spring Training facility is. On Wednesday morning Harvey vented his frustrations to the media, probably speaking a bit too candidly, via Andy Martino of the NY Daily News:
“The biggest part is wanting to stay with the team. To learn the league. To learn Travis (d’Arnaud). To learn how to bond with the other starting pitchers, and the guys in the clubhouse, and the David Wrights who I plan on playing with.”
“I expressed that seven months in Port St. Lucie is a long time,” he said. “For me, I strongly felt that my best opportunity, and my motivation to come back quicker, stronger, work harder would be to be with the teammates. That’s kind of what I have always said. I have worked so hard to get to the big leagues and be with this team, it just felt like all of a sudden I was shooed to the back.”
“It’s just the fact that I have been not allowed to talk to anybody, and that every tweet or Instagram I send is, do not write,” Harvey said. “My locker — me and (Jeremy Hefner, also rehabbing) was basically in a closet. I didn’t think that was right. I don’t know exactly who was in charge of the situation. [“That was a decision made by clubhouse personnel,” GM Sandy Alderson later told me].
“I have worked so hard to get to the point where I was, and all of a sudden I get hurt, and it’s ‘you’ve got to stay in Florida,’” Harvey said. “‘You’ve got to disappear from New York, you’ve got to do this.’ I took pride in living in New York, and being a New Yorker. I live there all year round. It’s a place I love being.”
The whole situation is complicated and there seems to be a huge miscommunication between Harvey and the team. Martino’s interview with Harvey was cut short when Mets head of HR Jay Horwitz entered the room.
It’s pretty unclear as to how much Harvey is allowed to disclose to the media, and the extent, and Martino’s words with Manager Sandy Alderson just made things even more confusing.
So is Harvey to stay mum or can he speak as he wish about his rehab progression? The answer is both yes or no–technically he can, but it seems that it’s a move the Mets would like him to shy away from.