Quintana Gets Lost Again

I was looking forward to watching Jose Quintana pitch early this season, much as I looked forward to watching Shaun Marcum pitch early in 2013 and Carlos Carrasco pitch early in 2021, to name two offseason pickups who were waylaid en route to their Met debuts by Spring Training injuries. Quintana has a small stress fracture on his fifth rib on his left side. That means we’re naming a third offseason pickup waylaid en route to his Met debut by a Spring Training injury. What Quintana doesn’t have is a timetable to return. Marcum didn’t appear until late April of ’13, Carrasco not before July of ’21 was almost over.

Rotation depth in the person of David Peterson, Tylor Megill or whoever cares to step up just became more vital in 2023, just as it did when the Mets had to wait on Carrasco two years back and Marcum a whole decade ago. I really looked forward to Carrasco. I may be stretching it to say I looked forward to Marcum, because I don’t honestly recall being overly anticipant in advance of his debut, but I didn’t want him to be delayed in making the team, either. You get a new pitcher, you want to see his business arm in action.

Quintana carries another layer of appeal beyond what an experienced lefty coming off a fairly splendid season somewhere else might bring to a rotation: Jose is poised to become the latest member of a tribe we can call lost. In fact, I did refer to it as lost, as in Lost Boys Found, a Mets subgroup rounded up in this space at this time of year in 2010. The occasion for the virtual reunion then was the quasi-homecoming of Jason Bay, nominated as the avatar of the LBF crew. Lost Boys Found meant major league players who had up through the ranks in the Mets minors but had to leave the organization to first make the bigs. The cohort that was about to encompass Bay already counted among its prodigal veterans the likes of Jerry Morales, Endy Chavez, Angel Pagan and Nelson Figueroa at the top end, and…some other guys, let’s say. Let’s also say that if Jason Bay had lived up to his previous MLB notices upon becoming a Met, Jason Bay would have led the LBFs into Met lore. Instead, I think we’re good counting Bay as one among some other guys.

His small stress-fractured fifth rib willing, Jose will have his chance to live out every erstwhile Met farmhand’s dream and become a certified Met before long. That was presumably Jose’s aspiration when he signed with us as a youngster from Colombia at 17. The kid pitched in three games for the Mets’ entry in the Venezuelan Summer League in 2006. I was too busy watching Endy Chavez and the 2006 Mets to learn he had debuted, and too busy watching Endy Chavez and the 2007 Mets to notice he was released. There was a suspension in between, stemming, he explained a half-dozen years later, from “sports medicine” he was taking to aid a back injury. Whatever it was he’d ingested as a youngster from another continent, it was against minor league rules, and by 2008, Quintana was in the Yankees’ system. He’d make the majors with the White Sox in 2012, the All-Stars in 2016, and contribute to two postseason runs with the Cubs in 2017 and the Cardinals in 2022.

Seventeen years since he was a seventeen-year-old, he’s a Met. That’s a lot of wandering for a Lost Boy to do until he could be found. May the small stress fracture (small when it’s in somebody else’s rib) amount to a mere grain amid the sands of time where Quintana and the Mets are concerned. He and we have waited this long for him to be a Met. We can wait a little longer.

And as was no doubt uttered in some form or fashion in the springs when Marcum and Carrasco had to wait a little longer, next man up!