The BOGeY MAN
ALDeRSON TO CeSPeDeS: TIMe TO BAG The GOLF GAMe
The Mets have told Yoenis Cespedes to put away the golf clubs for a while now that they’ve finally put him on the disabled list with a strained right quad.
General manager Sandy Alderson acknowledged that it was “bad optics” for Cespedes to play 18 holes before Wednesday’s game in The Bronx — especially because he wound up aggravating the injury during the Mets’ loss.
He added that team doctors did not believe his activities on the golf course contributed to the leg injury.
“But let’s face it, playing golf during the day and then going out and getting injured in the evening, it’s a bad visual,” Alderson said before Thursday night’s game at Yankee Stadium. “I think he recognizes it at this point and we’ll go from there.”
Alderson said he talked with Cespedes’ “people,” but not with the outfielder personally.
“That message will get to him, at least circuitously,” Alderson said. “And probably directly.”
The message, mostly, was: “Let’s use common sense here,” according to Alderson said.
Common sense can be hard to find sometimes.
Cespedes first made news with his golf game during Game 4 of the NLCS last October, when he was seen on the links and then left the game that night in Chicago with a shoulder injury.
Some would argue the Mets didn’t use common sense with his lingering quad injury that finally sent him to the DL after a month, and the GM acknowledged the Mets should have made the move sooner.
“It’s been a trying month or so with Yoenis and the injury and in retrospect, we probably should have just put him on the DL in the beginning of this episode,” Alderson said. “On the other hand, he wanted to try to play through it.’’
Alderson credited Cespedes for his effort, but both sides agreed that this latest setback, which happened during a swing in his final at-bat Wednesday night, made a DL stint inevitable.
While Alderson admitted there might have been an issue with Cespedes’ round of golf, an unusually agitated Terry Collins took the other side, saying the golf had “nothing to do with it.”
“The night before, he ran hard to first base OK,” Collins said. “[Wednesday], why the swing caused the problem, I can’t answer it. ... Matter of fact, I didn’t even know he played golf ’til [the media] brought it up. So had it been bothering him, then he would have said something.”
Continuing down a different path than Alderson would take later, Collins blamed the media for the firestorm.
“You guys all try to draw a connection,” Collins said. “What if he went fishing? What the hell? Golfing had nothing to do with his leg. His leg has been bothering him. [Wednesday] night, it bothered him even more. We made a decision it was time to put him on the DL.”
And unlike the GM, Collins said he was unconcerned with “visuals” or “optics.”
“I don’t care about perception,’’ Col- lins said. “I deal with reality. The reality is, he was OK. He was OK to play [Wednesday] night. The reality is, he came up after his last at-bat and said, ‘My leg’s bothering me again.’ It happened from when he got on base. He ran the bases. It didn’t hurt him in the fourth inning; it didn’t hurt him in the sixth inning. It hurt him in the ninth inning. That’s reality. That’s what we have to deal with. We can’t worry about what happened at 12 in the afternoon. We’ve got to worry about what happened at 10 o’clock [Wednesday] night. That’s when he hurt his leg.”
Now the Mets have to deal with life without Cespedes for at least the next two weeks.
The one bit of positive news — if you can call it that — is that Alderson said an MRI taken after he re-injured the quad Wednesday showed no fur- ther damage than what was there when he suffered the original injury.
In the meantime, it’s become clear this probably won’t be the last time Cespedes finds himself at the center of a controversy.
“I think everybody’s taking it seriously,” Alderson said. “Yoenis takes it seriously. But Yoenis has his own personal life that’s sometimes larger than life and we’ve seen that from the beginning of spring training.”