ZACK MUST ATTACK

Wheeler needs to use those who doubt him as fuel for his comeback

PORT ST. LUCIE — Chances are Zack Wheeler has never been described as defiant, not with a laid-back personality that translates into an easygoing manner on and off the baseball field.

And I’m not sure it’s the right word now, after spending some time talking to him in the Mets’ clubhouse, but, well, let’s put it this way: Wheeler hears the noise out there and he wants to shout it down with the right arm that once seemed to hold the most promise of all the Mets’ celebrated starting pitchers.

He knows that some fans are ready to give up on him, convinced that early soreness here in spring training is proof he’ll never make it back from his 2015 Tommy John surgery, and it angers him.

The trick is making it work for him rather than against him when he has been living with and fighting doubts for months now, or since a series of setbacks kept him from making an expected return to the starting rotation last summer.

And in this social media-crazed world it is more difficult than ever to tune out the noise.

“I was actually thinking about that when I was on the field,’’ Wheeler was saying at his locker. “Because it gets to a point where people stop believing in you: they say it’s either in your head or you don’t want to play. “That can get to you, but finally, I was like, ‘why am I letting this get in my head and bother

me?’ I couldn’t care less what people say about me, but they don’t understand how much I want to be out there.

“I just want to be healthy and pitch. I miss it. I think I kind of took it for granted, but two years is a long, long time.’’

On Sunday, Wheeler took a step in the right direction, throwing a bullpen for the first time since experiencing soreness earlier in the week, and said he felt good about it afterward.

Yet the doubt never goes away entirely after what he has been through, missing two full seasons since surgery in March of 2015.

You could hear it in Wheeler’s voice on his first day in camp, when he said he wasn’t getting his hopes up about a return to form because he’d already had so many setbacks. But since then he has indicated that’s a mind game he plays, feeling more comfortable keeping expectations down publicly.

The reality, however, is that he came to camp with high hopes after an offseason in which he finally was able to throw regularly without the slightest bit of discomfort in his elbow.

“This whole offseason I was on a throwing program and it wasn’t bothering me,’’ he said. “I was letting it loose, I was letting it eat, throwing as hard as I could, and I was fine.

“I wasn’t even getting sore the next day, which was surprising to me. I was like, ‘what’s going on here? I’m not even sore.’ And of course I come here and it gets sore.

“I don’t think I was trying to do too much, but when you get on that mound, you know you need to pick it up a little to start getting ready for games.

“It’s beyond frustrating. I’m so tired of it, I just want to be healthy and pitch. But I wasn’t really worried because it was still coming out of my hand well. And now it’s feeling good.’’

Even so, Wheeler didn’t push his arm during his bullpen session Sunday, taking Dan Warthen’s advice to be cautious in ramping back up to full effort in the coming days.

So it remains to be seen if Wheeler can get over the hump, and while it’s easy to conclude the odds are against him, Steven Matz went through a similar ordeal, missing more than two full seasons after Tommy John surgery in 2010.

“I’ve talked to Zack about it,’’ Matz said. “But I don’t know if it’s the same as it was for me. I had to break through the scar tissue. Everybody is telling you, ‘just push through it, push through it,’ but it’s hard to do that when your arm feels restricted.”

In Matz’s case, it wasn’t until Dr. James Andrews told him an MRI in 2012 made it unclear whether he might need a second surgery, and the only way to know for sure was to go out and throw as hard as he could and see if the elbow held up.

Matz did so without pain and says it “gave me peace of mind’’ that allowed him to finally return to pitching.

To that, Wheeler says, “I’ve had the peace of mind. It’s not that.’’ No, he says, as if wanting to speak to the doubters on Twitter directly, “It’s not in my head.”

That’s as close as Wheeler will come to declaring he’ll get through this and pitch in 2017. For him it’s practically defiant.