The New York Mets are about to enter the home stretch of a wasted season. Along with said wasted season, comes a long winter to recuperate. However before that opportunity arises, the team still has a little over a month of games remaining. They also have several players that they counted on heavily for this season showing their battle scars.
For example, Jason Bay (concussion), with his hefty free agent contract, is just beginning to continue physical activities and just about ready to get back into the lineup. Why? Because he wants to get back in time to play a handful of meaningless games and chance re-aggravating some previous injury?
How about Jose Reyes? He started the season injured (thyroid), and it continued throughout the season (hamstring), not that he missed a ton of games, but he did sit out enough to be missed in that anemic lineup.
In fact, Jeff Francoeur, Jon Niese, and a handful of others all spent time on the DL this year or have missed some time with a nagging injury as well. That’s part of a 162 game season. That’s to be expected. However, at this stage of the season that remains, it may not be prudent to have the most injury-prone players in harm’s way. In particular, the players that are deemed to be “the core players,” are the ones that have the most to lose by sustaining another injury this year.
Reyes may have tweaked his previous injury and still could be ready to go, but why risk it? The aforementioned Bay is worth too much to the franchise to make his current injury worse. So to reiterate, why? If these players are hurting and have nothing to play for, why play?
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