Fickle finger of fate dooms Velasquez
PHILADELPHIA » It was just another Mets blowout of the Phillies Thursday night, except this time it came with an edgy plot line... Vince Velasquez’s middle finger. It was either numb or painful, either the whole finger or just the tip. It was described as all of that and more. Whatever it was, it would knock Velasquez out of the game after only one very bad inning of pitching, and eight innings later the Mets were 10-0 winners over the Phillies.
Velasquez was serious when he said he had no idea why, but for some reason the middle finger of his pitching hand went kablooey earlier in the day. And yet he tried to pitch anyway.
“We agreed to let him go out there,” manager Pete Mackanin said.
Bad idea. In the space of 32 pitches, the Mets scored three runs off Velasquez, and he wouldn’t answer the bell for Inning Two. This for a finger injury announced as “numbness” but what he called “painful.”
“It affected me a little bit,” Velasquez said, “but I just tried to pitch through it. See how it felt, see how it reacted. It kind of came out of nowhere. It was just a weird feeling. Kind of like, just one of those blisters where you automatically get it somehow, some way. It just appears.” Oh, so it was a blister? “No,” he said. “Just bruising.” Oh. “I don’t even know how it occurred,” he added. “Again, how does a blister occur? I mean, just from throwing a ball all the time. But at this point, again, it’s just a bruising. I can’t say exactly what it is because we don’t even know. So, um, it is bruised. And at this point we take it as it is and move forward tomorrow.”
There were injuries in the past, too, such as one to his shoulder just this past May. It would figure a shoulder impingement could cause a numbness in another part of the arm, but Velasquez swore this was not related to the shoulder. Whatever “this” was. “As you could see, there were some pitches that were wild,” he said. “They were all over the place. I threw one to the backstop, completly missed (catcher Cameron Rupp’s) glove. I had no control over it. It clearly affected me. It was just the whole middle finger. The tip . ... Anyway, I had no control at all.”
Velasquez said he will be examined Friday by “some specialist that we have that knows fingers more than any of us here.”
As for his best guess his next start...
“From where we stand right now, I don’t know,” Velasquez said. “Again, have faith and be optimistic, pretty much shoot for the next start. But where we stand right now, I’m clueless just as much as they are and just as much as you guys are.
“I had numerous years in the minor leagues dealing with tons of injuries. I was very injury prone. So it’s tough. You don’t want to labeled as about making that person and again, it’s my fault, I guess, as far as not taking care of myself. But this is just one of those things that I can’t control. It’s a simple bruising that really affected me today.”
*** NOTES » DeGrom dominated the Phillies for nearly seven full innings Thursday night, but was slammed by a line drive off the bat of Nick Williams with two gone in the sixth. That ended deGrom’s night with a bruised triceps. He was pitching a four-hit shutout with nine strikeouts against no walks when he left. He improved his record to 13-5 . ... Aaron Altherr’s second hamstring injury in three weeks apparently will keep him out into the next month. “He came back quickly off the first one and re-aggravated it. So we’re going to make sure we’re conservative to make sure it is 100 percent healed before he comes back (again),” GM Matt Klentak said. “Our best guess is sometime in September.”