Optimistic Conforto eager to return to action

Michael Conforto wants to return to the Mets now. But just a few weeks removed from shoulder surgery, he has to deal with that horrible, terrible word. Patience. “It’s just adversity, a different kind of adversity I have to deal with,” Conforto said Saturday at Citi Field in his first public comments since tearing the posterior capsule in his left shoulder and undergoing surgery.

“I want to get things going right now,” he said. “I want to start therapy, I want to start making this thing bet- ter, but for where I’m at, it’s just letting it heal, and in a couple weeks, I can start doing stuff.”

That stuff is physical therapy. Baseball activity — the stuff Mets fans really care about with the 24-year-old All-Star, who was hitting .279 with 27 homers when he was injured simply swinging Aug. 24 — still is about six months away. But everything is on course and the outlook is good.

“Both the doctors I saw said the fact it was the back [of the] shoulder, that’s a good thing, and they both said they expect a full recovery, no loss of strength, no loss of motion, as long as I am diligent in my therapy,” said Conforto, who added “the general [recovery] outline is six months [but] it’s not a set deadline.”

With his arm in a sling that makes sleeping as comfortable as walking barefoot through a landfill, Conforto was upbeat and positive. For every apparent negative, Conforto stressed a positive, like the fact the injury was in the back of his shoulder, not the front.

“That’s a good thing,” he said. “As well, it’s not my throwing shoulder. That’s another of the positives. And it won’t affect my swing quite as much.”

Surgery over straight therapy and rest? The knife pretty much eliminates the chance of the injury reoccurring.

“I had a choice, but with the instability and the timing — we have the offseason to recover — I didn’t want to make it a situation where we rehab, it feels good and then all of a sudden it happens again in the first month of the season and I lose a whole season, it happens again in the middle of the year and we’re in a playoff race and we miss the playoffs,” Conforto said. “So I wanted to make sure we just got it done and I miss as little time as possible.”

Conforto, a two-way high school football player, noted some instability in the shoulder may have resulted from playing his second sport way back then, when being a high school kid, which qualifies for dimwit status, he played through pain.

“It never dislocated,” Conforto said. “I wouldn’t have thought much of it, just playing through pain. And it wasn’t my throwing shoulder. … It looked like some damage from a former injury but nothing that kept me out of games, just created some instability in there.”