Every team and town swears they have the best sports fans on the globe.
Even still, you won't find a more protective or obsessive lot than Big Apple baseball fans. So while, by any objective metric, it sounds silly to say this about someone with a 34-37 career record, you have to be a New Yorker to realize how epic Matt Harvey once was.
You have to be a New Yorker to feel the hypnotic domain Harvey had over New York City when he pitched. Not since Doc Gooden had a pitcher drained the adrenal gland when he took the mound. Even in the noise and mayhem of NYC, there was a distinct sense of mystery the nights he lorded over Flushing. So when Tom Verducci, the best baseball writer on the planet, branded Harvey "The Dark Knight of Gotham," not one of us blinked or winced. It fit.
Not even the Yankees, with an infinitely greater history of success and conquest, have spawned a pitcher from their farm system who so quickly wrapped us around his pitching hand the way Harvey did those first few magical months, which culminated with his visage splashed across the cover of Sports Illustrated, his perfect sobriquet handed to him by Verducci.
MORE: Schwei's Mets Notes: Bounce Back In San Diego, Vargas Returns and Extra Innings
So if this reads a bit like an obituary, maybe it is. At least in a vocational sense, Harvey is either at a final crossroads or at the end of the road. Harvey is a wholly incongruous 0-2, with a 5.76 ERA. So bad that he's now been bumped to the bullpen.
And just like the times he missed a game or a postseason workout or acted sideways over his conga line of supermodels, he's once again closer to Page Six than the sports page. The New York Post reported this week that Harvey was at some swanky Los Angeles gala a night before he pitched against the San Diego Padres. It was more important for Harvey to rub elbows with Halle Berry and Cindy Crawford than grind his way out of this slump that grows exponentially by the week.
And it raises a proposition we neither predicted nor wanted to ask: Maybe it's time for the Mets to show Harvey the door.
Where did it all go wrong? It's myopic to say he was felled by an appetite for nightlife. Indeed, another Big Apple icon, Joe Namath, was celebrated for long nights, whiskey and women. Young men of note have the same hungers of young men who are not. Perhaps Tommy John was part of it. As was the thoracic outlet syndrome. Or maybe it was something else.
MORE: Report: Minority Shares Of Mets Being Sold
You'll recall the rabid debate in 2015 over Harvey's pitching output, and agent Scott Boras' pining to put Harvey on the shelf for the year. Had he thrown too many innings and cost himself one of those biblical contracts signed by Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer? We'll never know. Harvey pitched that autumn, all the way to the World Series. And perhaps he knew what we know, that while no one doubts the merits of being wealthy, Harvey came within one inning of being worshiped.
We want a direct cause-and-effect so we can explain it. But too many things happened to Harvey, much by his own hand, to pin one event onto his bio, or to even define the metaphorical cliff from which he has plunged. There's always been a part of Harvey that seems detached from reality, even if celebrities rarely live in it. He didn't understand why it was a big deal if he didn't show up for some workout or a game he wasn't pitching, or why reporters dare to ask if he's willing to take a demotion to the bullpen.
We're hearing the same platitudes from Harvey we hear from much older men. He feels fine. There were moments. He's just a bad pitch or two from putting it all together. It's the hubris of the defeated. Just like his flat fastballs, his reasons have now turned into excuses, flat words in sad monotone. The Mets may keep him around this season because why not? They can't boot him to the minors without his blessing, and his name still has some cachet in Gotham, even if he hasn't been a superhero in years.
Even Yankees fans -- like yours truly -- take no delight in this because Harvey was more than a Met. He was, for a fleeting glowing moment, a giant, the tallest member of our baseball skyline. Just as no one wants to see a landmark building pounded to rubble, there's no joy in seeing the mask pulled from the Dark Knight of Gotham.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
