Kallet: While He's At Rock-Bottom, Don't Feel Sorry For Mets' Harvey
By Brad Kallet
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The Mets have had a massively significant last six days on the field.
Despite players dropping like flies and continuing struggles with the bats, New York has rattled off five of six to move back within a half-game of the the first-place Nationals in the NL East. After getting absolutely drubbed by Washington on Wednesday and Thursday in Queens in an utterly embarrassing display, New York managed to scratch out three straight wins over Milwaukee and return the favor to the Nationals by taking two of three in their park.
Yet, nobody is really talking about that, are they? The Mets are gutting out key wins with a depleted roster and holes all over the place, but all the talk remains centered on ... Matt Harvey.
And why shouldn't it? It's a fascinating story with countless angles, and it is critically important, no matter how you look at it. The obvious concern, of course, is that Harvey has morphed, rather instantly, from one of the best pitchers in the league into one of the worst. Is he hurt? Are his mechanics off? Is it all in his head, and is he mentally defeated? Is he simply fatigued after throwing 216 innings in his first season back from Tommy John surgery?
Nobody really knows, except for Harvey, himself, and perhaps the Mets' brass. They might not even know. It's a mystery. Once considered a top-five pitcher in baseball, he's not even a top-five pitcher in his own rotation right now.
The Mets are built on their starting pitching, and if they're going to return to the playoffs and contend for a World Series, they're going to need Harvey pitching like an ace -- or, at the very least, a No. 2.
But we all know Harvey's importance to the Mets' success, and there's no reason to rehash his brutal stat line, but ... we'll do it anyway: 3-7 with a 6.08 ERA, eight home runs and 73 hits allowed in 53 1/3 innings.
Ouch.
What I find most interesting about the former All-Star's fall from grace is the man inside the uniform.
Ever since Harvey burst onto the scene with a vengeance in 2012 and took the league by storm, he's been rather unlikable -- young and naive at best and arrogant, conceited, selfish and entitled at worst.
Where do we begin? The examples are endless. Let me clarify that his status as a New York celebrity -- the Rangers games, the supermodel girlfriends, the endorsements, the penchant for designer suits and the interviews about his personal life -- don't particularly bother me. He's young, rich and good looking, and is a professional athlete living in Gotham.
God bless him. We should all be so fortunate. And, to the best of our knowledge, his off-the-field extracurricular activities have never gotten in the way of his performance every fifth day.
What has always rubbed me -- and many Mets fans, I believe -- the wrong way was his demeanor. On a small scale, getting into it with fans on Twitter, professing his desire to be just like Derek Jeter because of the "women he's dated," talking about a $200 million contract when he has been in the league for a year and showing up at Yankee Stadium while the Mets are on the field in D.C. were off-putting.
Then there were the larger-scale issues, such as putting incessant pressure on general manager Sandy Alderson and manager Terry Collins to let him pitch when they were clearly looking out for his best interests, and letting his agent, Scott Boras, make Harvey's innings limit the story when his team is approaching its first trip to the playoffs in nearly a decade.
How about his attempt to bully Collins into letting him pitch the ninth inning of Game 5 of the World Series? (That worked out well.) How about his refusal to talk to the media after another awful start on Tuesday night, and leaving his teammates -- mainly catcher Kevin Plawecki, who has enough to worry about with an unsightly .186 average -- out to dry, with the responsibility of cleaning up the mess he started?
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Intentional or not, he's caused many fans to unfairly turn on Collins and Alderson, because his supporters believe that these two baseball lifers -- and the organization as a whole -- should bow down to Harvey's every request and treat him like the second coming of Cy Young. Did he need to go public with his plea to pitch when he wasn't even a year removed from surgery? Did he have to complain -- again, publicly -- about his innings limit, then ponder shutting himself down before the playoffs, and then announce to the world that he will indeed pitch in the postseason in a first-person piece for The Players' Tribune?
What a massive headache he's been for his manager, his GM, his owners and his teammates. Do you think David Wright, the captain and the epitome of a leader and world-class teammate, appreciates having to answer these questions over and over and over again? (And before you get on the media for asking said questions, there wouldn't be nearly as many if Harvey didn't bring so much of this on himself.)
And perhaps it's just his personality, but I've always wanted to see the right-hander show more emotion in the dugout and display some affection for his teammates. Noah Syndergaard's first career home run comes to mind. After the fireballer unexpectedly went deep at Citi Field, Harvey barely mustered a smile as his teammates went berserk.
No, I don't think that Harvey is a terrible person. He's never done anything awful (that we know of). No domestic violence. No criminal charges. No DUIs. No performance-enhancing drugs.
And yes, I desperately want him to rebound and pitch like an ace again, for the good of the team.
But it was very hard to like Harvey when he was on top of the world. And it's very hard to feel bad for him now.
Brad Kallet is the managing editor of TENNIS.com and a frequent contributor to WFAN.com. Follow him on Twitter @brad_kallet
