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Yoenis Cespedes, the Mets’ best hitter and highest paid player, is out for the season, another blow to the team in an increasingly dismal season.
Cespedes will have season-ending surgery to remove bone spurs and calcification near his Achilles tendons in both feet, resolving an awkward episode that began late last week when he voiced uncertainty about his ability to play through continued pain on the very day he returned to the Mets from the disabled list.
The operation is likely to sideline Cespedes for a chunk of the 2019 season as well. There is little to play for this season: The Mets were 41-57 entering Wednesday afternoon’s game against the San Diego Padres and one of the worst teams in baseball.
Cespedes, 32, is expected to be out eight to 10 months, and potentially longer, said John Ricco, the team’s assistant general manager.
No date has been scheduled yet, but the surgery will be performed by Robert Anderson, a foot specialist in Green Bay, Wis. The surgery will be performed in two parts: on one foot and then the other two to three months later, Ricco said.
Ricco said the Mets had an insurance policy for Cespedes’s four-year, $110 million contract, of which he is in his second year.
“I’ve known since a long time ago that the only choice was to have surgery,” Cespedes said. “I always thought about having the surgery after I retired. But now it reached a moment that I can’t think that way anymore.”
On Monday, the Mets placed Cespedes on the disabled list for the second time this season, and four days after he returned from a two-month absence for a hip injury. It is his fifth trip to the disabled list as a Met for a leg-related ailment.
Since Cespedes joined the Mets in a July 2015 trade that helped vault them to the World Series, they are appreciably a better team because of his dynamic hitting. But over the past three seasons, he has struggled to stay on the field.
The Mets re-signed him twice, including before the 2017 season. Cespedes has played in less than half of the Mets’ games since signing that deal. In 38 games this season, he has hit .262 with nine home runs, 29 runs batted in and an .821 on-base plus slugging percentage.
The clumsy incident started on Friday night. After his first game back from the disabled list, Cespedes revealed that his heels were the root cause of his many legs injuries over the years because heel pain had changed the way he walked and ran.
“The pain he’s feeling in his heels has contributed to a change in his running style,” Ricco said.
It was known that Cespedes had long dealt with heel problems, but never to this degree. He said that it had gotten worse over the past 15 years. He also said that he did not know if he could survive the rest of the season at this rate.
That late-night bombshell caught the Mets off guard. They later admitted that they knew Cespedes’s feet hurt after Friday’s game, but that it was the first time they had heard he was considering surgery.
To make matters worst, the next day, Manager Mickey Callaway said he was not aware of Cespedes’s comments. He later admitted he misspoke.
A Mets executive did not address the Cespedes situation until Sunday evening, nearly two days of silence that raised questions about the team’s decentralized and dysfunctional operation, and its history of mishandling injuries.
When Ricco, one of three executives in charge since General Manager Sandy Alderson stepped down last month after a recurrence of cancer, finally addressed the Cespedes situation on Sunday evening, he said the team viewed surgery as radical and as a last resort, perhaps even at the end of his career.
Cespedes, however, presented a dire situation to reporters after Friday’s game.
During an extensive rehabilitation under the Mets’ supervision, Cespedes played in three rehabilitation games and even visited a foot specialist last month. Even then, the heels were considered to be manageable, as they had been before, with shoe inserts, stretching and anti-inflammatories, as long as the pain was tolerable.
But after pain emerged only one game into his return, Cespedes was examined by David Altchek, the Mets’ medical director, and a foot specialist at the Hospital for Special Surgery on Monday. The tests were also sent to a doctor out of state, which caused the holdup in an announcement on Tuesday.
After more huddling, the Mets finally made an announcement on Wednesday, one that felt inevitable after Cespedes first voiced his concern on Friday.
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