Noah Syndergaard’s Tommy John Surgery Underscores The Reality For Hard Throwers—And The NY Mets

Two days before the Opening Day that’s been postponed indefinitely, the Mets made the type of baseball news that would have dominated the headlines a mere three weeks ago with the announcement Tuesday that Noah Syndergaard — the long-haired flamethrower on whom the Mets were counting to take another step in his development this season — suffered a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow and will undergo Tommy John surgery on Thursday.

Syndergaard will miss the 2020 season, however long it does or does not end up being, and likely most of the first half of the 2021 season, presuming it can begin on time or at all. Regardless of how long it takes for Syndergaard to recover, his injury — which the Mets say was detected before baseball shut down two weeks ago — underlines two inarguable facts about the sport.

The first is throwing harder than anyone else on the planet comes with a heavy price. According to fangraphs.com, Syndergaard’s average fastball of 97.7 mph last season was the hardest amongst big league starters. He returned to the top spot after ceding it the previous two seasons to crosstown rival Luis Severino, who averaged 97.5 mph with his fastball in 2018 and 97.6 mph in 2017, a year after Syndergaard averaged 98.2 mph.

Syndergaard succeeded Garrett Richards, who led the majors in average fastball velocity in both 2014 (96.4 mph) and 2015 (95.7 mph). And Richards followed in the footsteps of Matt Harvey, who led the majors with an average fastball velocity of 95.4 mph in 2013.

All these pitchers now have something else in common: They’re all members of Club Tommy John. Harvey underwent the operation in October 2013, Richards was operated on in July 2017 and Severino just had the procedure done last month.

Throwing a baseball as hard as one can is as inherently risky as it is tempting. So while it’d be great for the game and the men who step upon the mound if there was a shift in attitude towards pulling back the reins a little bit and de-emphasizing the radar gun, teams are going to continue rewarding the hardest throwers.

Teams can also protect themselves against the inevitable attrition by securing and adding as much rotation depth as possible. This, alas, leads us to our second point of the day — the Mets’ inability or refusal to actually secure and add as much rotation depth as possible.

The Mets entered spring training with six starters — ace Jacob deGrom as well as fellow holdovers Syndergaard, Marcus Stroman, Steven Matz and newcomers Rick Porcello and Michael Wacha. Regardless of how the Mets proceeded with the no. 5 spot — and there was little doubt Porcello was being groomed as the fifth starter and Wacha as a swingman — their rotation was impressively constructed.

Most teams couldn’t match a 1-2-3 punch of the two-time defending Cy Young Award winner deGrom, the hard-throwing Syndergaard and the solid sinker-balling Stroman. Matz was one of just 25 pitchers to make at least 30 starts each of the last two seasons, and while Porcello and Wacha each struggled in 2019, they offered the type of reliability and upside, respectively, not often seen with fifth starters.

The depth also represented a major upgrade for the Mets, who never added reinforcements prior to the 2019 season but rarely needed insurance as deGrom, Syndergaard, Stroman, Matz, Zack Wheeler and Jason Vargas combined to make 154 starts (Vargas was traded one day after Stroman was acquired from the Blue Jays).

Now, of course, the Mets have no depth, unless you are eager to see if Walter Lockett can improve upon the 8.34 ERA he posted last season or if non-roster invitee Erasmo Ramirez can bounce back from posting a 6.50 ERA in 10 starts for the Mariners in 2019. And the rotation construction is considerably less imposing now than it was two days ago.

Of course, it didn’t have to be this way. While there’s no blaming the Mets for Syndergaard’s injury, they could have done a far better job of preparing for the inevitability of someone getting hurt…by never letting go of Wheeler in the first place.

The Mets had a chance to build some long-term certainty into their rotation during the second half of the 2018 season, when Wheeler began emerging as the team’s second-best pitcher behind deGrom. At the time, Wheeler had made just 37 starts since the end of the 2014 season due to a two-year recovery from Tommy John surgery as well as a pair of injuries (biceps tendinitis and a stress reaction in his right arm) that cut his 2017 campaign short after 17 starts.

But he closed out the first half of 2018 by allowing four runs over 7 2/3 innings — his longest outing since going under the knife in March 2015 — in a win over the Nationals. The outing began to earn Wheeler the trust of then-manager Mickey Callaway, who left him in with one out in the eighth to face Bryce Harper, whom Wheeler struck out with a splitter.

“His overall attitude on the mound — I mean, I’m walking out there to see if he wants to stay and I’m not even halfway and he’s like ‘I want to stay in the game,’” Callaway said afterward. “I don’t know that you would have seen that in the past. Once he’s in that quality start area or whatever, he wants to stay out there and face their best hitters.”

The win over the Nationals began a season-ending 12-start stretch in which Wheeler went 10-1 with a 1.96 ERA, 0.86 WHIP and averaged 8.7 strikeouts per nine innings. Over his 13 second half starts, deGrom went 5-5 with a 1.73 ERA and 0.83 WHIP while averaging 11.5 strikeouts per nine innings.

Wheeler’s surge, produced at the end of his fifth season of team control (i.e. the year before his walk year), provided both the player and the team with a window, as rare as it was small, to cut a long-term deal that was good for both sides. An extension for Wheeler would have provided financial security to someone who still hadn’t proven he was all the way back from his health woes. For the Mets, they would have locked up a still-ascending starter (Wheeler turned 28 during the 2018 season) at a price that could prove to be a bargain.

But these are the Mets, who can never think more than a half-step ahead, and no contract offer was made to Wheeler even though he is a creature of habit who is represented by B.B. Abbott, the agent who negotiated a career’s worth of mutually friendly deals between Chipper Jones and the Braves. By last spring, Wheeler was willing to bet on himself, and he hit it big by signing with the division rival Phillies for five years and $118 million.

Wheeler was still Mets property at the end of the season because the team didn’t trade him for prospects, instead choosing the familiar doing-two-things-at-once route by acquiring Stroman from the Blue Jays in order to chase a long-shot wild card berth while landing Wheeler’s 2020 replacement.

But why did it have to be one and the other? Why couldn’t the Mets, a big-market team whose games air on a team-owned network, pair Stroman with Wheeler this season too — especially after giving up what was left of the farm (pitchers Anthony Kay and Simeon Woods Richardson) to acquire Stroman? Losing a pitcher such as Syndergaard is always going to hurt. But a deGrom-Wheeler-Stroman-Matz-Wacha rotation would be far more formidable than a deGrom-Stroman-Matz-Porcello-Wacha quintet.

And the decision not to extend Wheeler is likely to haunt the Mets even after Syndergaard returns. Stroman, Porcello and Wacha are all scheduled to reach free agency at the end of the season, though that could be impacted by a shortened or canceled 2020 campaign. Syndergaard and Matz are scheduled to reach free agency following the 2021 season. The formidable rotation isn’t likely to remain formidable for long, which was an unfortunate and unsurprising reality for the Mets long before Tuesday’s 1-2 punch of unfortunate and unsurprising reality.