Reyes To Have Surgery; Minaya To Blame?
The sad state of the Mets play as well as their injury list lead me to go dormant for a while but I saw a story this morning that infuriated me so that I needed to come out of hiding and discuss.
It appears that Jose Reyes, who’s been on the DL since May, will be having surgery after tearing a hamstring while running the other day. This new injury is in addition to the tendon he’s been rehabbing for months (literally) which, by the way, will probably also be operated on.
Let’s review the teams training and medical staff’s strategy for dealing with Reyes this year. Let him keep playing after the initial injury so he can aggravate it to the point where he’s gone for the season. Allow him to rehab the injury without surgery and monitor the rehab in such a way that he suffers not one but two new injuries along the way. Then recommend surgery for two of the three injuries. Am I missing something here?
How does a guy who is under the watchful eyes of the teams medical and training staffs suffer two injuries while rehabbing another? The only answer is incompetence. The question is where the incompetence is. Is it with the training staff whose programs should have the players in better shape? Is it with the medical staff who is not treating injuries seriously enough? Is it someone else along the reporting lines who downplays the seriousness of injuries to the decision makers? Or is it the decision makers for disregarding the the warnings?
I’m not sure what the answer to the question is but what happened this season has been building since Omar Minaya became general manager of the team. Every year there have been a handful of situations where injured players continued to play despite the obvious seriousness of their injuries. They’d continue to play until the injury got so bad that they missed significantly more time than if they had been put on the DL in the first place.
Earlier we could have blamed Willie Randolph for this anomaly (and some did) but it continued to occur after he was fired. Look no further than John Maine‘s situation last season for proof of that. If the blame for this was on the manager then surely it would have improved after Randolph’s ouster. As much as you’d like to put it on Jerry Manuel’s shoulders this is one situation I don’t think you can blame him for.
I think it’s Minaya who is to blame for the injury situation. Up until this season it hasn’t had a major affect on the teams finish. The collapses of the last two years should be put on the managers, coaches and players. But this year the injury issues cost the Mets the season. Not just part of the season but the whole darn thing. And Minaya must be held accountable by the Wilpons. Whether it’s firing him, taking some of the medical decisions out of his hands or some other solution the Wilpons owe it to the fans as well as whoever it is that can afford to buy tickets at CitiField (I sure can’t) to address this situation so that next season doesn’t get lost the way this one did.
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