PORT ST. LUCIE - So the Mets are being proactive with Luis Robert Jr., drilling down on the causes for his chronic leg injuries, and intending to keep him out of games while their medical and sports performance people work to “straighten out” some of the reasons that have kept him from achieving his potential.
It speaks to the gamble they’re taking on Robert Jr. in a trade with the Chicago White Sox for his $20 million salary, as well as the frustration of trying to keep such a high-ceiling athlete off the injured list.
But it’s also a good thing, especially in this day and age when there is so much science and technology applied to the cause and prevention of injuries.
All the more so in the case of the Mets.
It wasn’t too many years ago, remember, when the Mets were heavily criticized for their handling of injuries, either for being too slow to react or for somehow making injuries worse with treatment.
With that in mind, after listening to Carlos Mendoza announce the “progression” plan for Robert, as well as three other players, I put in a call to Jim Duquette, the SNY analyst and former Mets GM.
He’d seen the Robert Jr. news as well, and so when he saw I was calling, he answered his phone by saying with a laugh:
“I know why you’re calling. Jose Reyes?”
“Sorry, Jim,” I said, laughing a bit myself. “It’s the first thing I thought of.”
Duquette, after all, was the assistant GM to Steve Phillips in 2003 when the Mets became so perplexed by Reyes’ recurring hamstring injuries and an examination revealing that one leg was shorter than the other, that they deferred to track and field experts who tried to change Reyes’ running style.
“We were going with the experts in the field of sprinting,” Duquette recalled. “But it didn’t work. Jose wasn’t comfortable with it and eventually went back to his old style. These days, they probably would have realized it was a hip issue that was causing the difference in leg length and treated it from there.
“I mean, as an industry, baseball is light years ahead of where we were then in terms of sports medicine and science. Actually, I like what the Mets are doing. The White Sox have not been a forward-thinking organization. They’ve been old-school, where the Mets have become very forward-thinking with this stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get a good result from what they’re doing. It’s smart because Robert has incredible skill when he’s right. He just hasn’t been able to stay healthy.”
Duquette, by the way, reminded me that he was gone from the Mets by the time they put Ryan Church on a cross-country flight with a concussion, another rather infamous injury of the many that seemed to become full-blown controversies over a period of several years.
But as Duquette pointed out, this is a much different organization these days.
For that matter, as one Mets person told me, “Steve (Cohen) doesn’t just spend on players. When he took over, he invested in making every facet of the organization top-notch, and sports science and performance was a big part of that.”
That said, you can make the case that injuries are more of an issue in all sports than ever these days, though a lot of baseball people believe that’s mostly a byproduct of the modern athlete building their body to the limit and stressing it to the extreme.
And there’s probably a lot of truth to that as well. Duquette, for example, noted that what helped Reyes eventually avoid chronic hamstring injuries, and thus rack up 517 stolen bases over a 16-year career, was that “he learned how to run, and run fast, without going max effort all the time.”
More recently, the Mets’ new emphasis on injury prevention has paid off in helping keep the once-chronically injured Brandon Nimmo relatively healthy, in part by bringing him along slowly in spring training as they will now with Robert Jr.
They’re taking similar caution with Jorge Polanco, wanting him to strengthen a knee that had surgery in 2024, as well as Brett Baty, who tweaked a hamstring while working out before camp opened, and Francisco Alvarez, in hoping to avoid the various hand and wrist injuries that have plagued him the last couple of years.
But the headliner is Robert Jr., mostly because the Mets are hoping he’ll stay healthy enough to reach the potential that made him an All-Star in 2023.
“The tools are there,” Mendoza said. “He’s got a chance to do something special if he can stay healthy. When we traded for him, our trainers put their hands on him and identified some of the things, especially in the lower half, that needed to be straightened out.
“He’s going through full workouts, he’s going to be getting live at-bats, but as far as putting him in game settings when he has to full-go, whether it’s beating out a ground ball…we’re not going to put him in there out of the gate.”
Robert Jr. is on board, and why not? He believes, as he said in a media interview, that injuries are the primary reason his numbers have fallen off dramatically since his 38-home runs season in 2023, when he made the AL All-Star team.
“Health, that’s the No. 1 thing,” he said. “If I stay on the field as consistently as I can, I know things will go the way I want.”
He offered evidence of that last summer, when the Mets were interested in trading for him, only to be put off by the asking price.
Over 31 games in July and August, Robert slashed .298/.352/.456 with five home runs, 18 RBI, 24 runs scored and 11 stolen bases, resembling his 2023 form.
Then he suffered another hamstring injury, severe enough that it ended his season. The Mets are hoping they can change all of that, and their own injury history as well.
No offense, Jim.
