Remember, in the wake of the Carlos Beltran fiasco, how the Mets wanted those mean people in the media and all us nasty bloggers to think about the rash of injuries that derailed the team on a case-by-case basis, instead of trying to look for patterns?
Well OK. Fair enough. Let’s evaluate these comments from J.J. Putz, in a conversation with Sox Drawer [1].
First Putz said that when the trade with the Mariners happened, “I never really had a physical with the Mets. I had the bone spur [in the right elbow]. It was discovered the previous year in Seattle, and it never got checked out by any other doctors until I got to spring training, and the spring training physical is kind of a formality.”
OK. That’s fairly astonishing, given Putz’s injury history, but let’s just keep on going for now.
Putz said that in April and May it was clear he was hurt, and the Mets told him not to talk about that with the media. “I knew that I wasn’t right,” he said. “I wasn’t healthy. The toughest part was having to face the media and tell them that you feel fine, even though you know there’s something wrong and they don’t want you telling them that you’re banged up.”
Putz’s conclusion: He’s learned a lesson. “That it’s my career, and when you know something doesn’t feel right, and they want to take these little sidesteps to do something, and just wait and wait and wait, you got to get it taken care of instead of trying to prolong the inevitable.”
My conclusion? I’ve got two of them.
1. Doesn’t this sound like Carlos Beltran would agree?
2. With more and more evidence out there, can anyone claim with a straight face that the Mets baseball-operations folks aren’t mindbogglingly incompetent?
Oh, I’m sorry, there I go looking for patterns again. Nasty blogger!