Injury problem needs quick fix
REALITY hurts. The Mets are digesting just how much it hurts, and it remains to be seen if they learn from the latest train wreck of injuries.
Noah Syndergaard is gone until at least the end of July because of his torn lat — he is not allowed even to touch a baseball for six weeks. The Mets are searching for a reason why Yoenis Cespedes has pulled leg muscles each of the past two years and will bring him back to New York for more testing Monday.
The Mets are learning the hardest of lessons. But are they really learning?
Perhaps it’s time for the Mets — and most everybody else in baseball — to get away from the heavy duty weight-training approach and start doing more stretching, running and balance exercises.
Sure, players who look like comic book heroes sell, but often they can’t stay on the field. The Mets are the poster child for that problem.
Syndergaard loves his workout routine and bragged about adding 17 pounds of muscle this offseason. He said Saturday he had no regrets about making the start when he tore his lat after having issues with his biceps during the week.
“I don’t regret it at all, I threw a bullpen two days prior and felt great,’’ Syndergaard said before the Mets battered the inept Marlins, 11-3 at Citi Field, but lost shortstop Asdrubal Cabrera to a thumb injury. “Something weird happened.”
Syndergaard said he didn’t think his workouts had anything to do with his injury.
“I do love to work out and I love to train, but I take a lot of pride in training the right way,’’ the big right-hander said. “I don’t think that played a factor in what happened.
“It stings, but at the same time you have to go out there and be positive. I’ve never been on the DL before.’’
When The Post asked general manager Sandy Alderson what he will do if the next time the club wants to have a player take an MRI exam and the player, a la Syndergaard, refuses, Alderson responded: “That’s a very good question. In the face of what transpired this time, I would have to consider that very seriously before sending him out.”
Alderson mentioned how difficult it is to make those decisions, noting: “One of the things I want to emphasize is we make these decisions every day and one of them certainly went sideways, but I can tell you two days later we had to make a decision on whether to get an MRI and shut somebody down or not. It’s not like this comes up once a month, once a season, once a decade, it comes up all the time. Because it happens all the time, we need to make sure that our decision-making process, that ends with me, is as good as it can possibly be. Because it happens so often there is no excuse for it not being as good as it can be.’’
You can sympathize with Al- derson, who insists he feels good about his team’s strength-and-conditioning program, because all this is such a tough call but the Mets must be better at making those calls and keeping players on the field.
Teams look for complex answers, but this might be a simple one — too much weight-training overall.
“Baseball is looking for those answers,’’ Alderson said. “It’s pretty apparent we haven’t come up with an answer. Not all these injuries are the same, often they are not even similar. There may be a host of contributing factors. We need to make sure that from a medical standpoint, from a training standpoint, from a rehabilitation standpoint that we are not contributing to the problem. I think there is a problem and I think it’s a generic problem across the industry.
“As an industry we are frustrated by it and as an organization we are as well.’’
The Mets are looking seriously at the puzzle. They need to look harder and reevaluate how their players prepare to play this game.
Something weird, indeed.