Carlos Beltran Gets Scoped

Carlos Beltran had arthroscopic surgery yesterday on his right knee and, as a result, seems likely to miss the month of April. Needless to say, the Mets are not pleased about Beltran missing time. They appear to be even less pleased that Beltran apparently did not inform them that he was undergoing surgery. Whoops!

According to the Mets assistant GM John Ricco, the team was expecting to continue discussing options about treatment with Beltran, Boras and the team’s medical staff. To the contrary, according to Beltran’s agent, Scott Boras, the Mets consented to pay for the surgery beforehand and it had been discussed with Omar Minaya on Tuesday. There is obviously either some mis-communication or mis-information going on, but I doubt it leads to anything serious in the long term.

Furthermore from Boras, Beltran had been feeling pain in the knee since November and it was inhibiting his ability to perform conditioning drills in the lead up to Spring Training.

Losing an entire month of the season reminds us all again to always be skeptical on playing time estimates in player projections. Coming into today, CHONE had projected Beltran for 514 plate appearances, which seemed quite low to fans, who had Beltran projected for 606. That latter figure now already seems unreachable.

The missed time, if as bad as being initially reported, looks to cost the Mets somewhere between 5 and 10 runs of value. So while it’s easy to be overly dramatic about the surgery and repercussions, if it stays at this one isolated rehab then the magnitude of the effect to the Mets is not too damaging. I’m sure the New York media will realize that and handle this with a reasonable amount of understatement.

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