NEW YORK _ The final Harvey Day at Citi Field stretched for barely an hour on Thursday. It was mop-up duty for the unsightly mess created by Jason Vargas, and Harvey actually pitched worse, left out there to absorb five more runs of punishment by the Braves.
When Mickey Callaway mercifully appeared to take the baseball from Harvey, the manager patted him on the back. Harvey, head down and shoulders slumped, was booed relentlessly on his walk to the dugout.
Now we know those sad, pitiful steps turned out to be the last for Harvey in a Mets' uniform as Sandy Alderson announced Friday that he was being designated for assignment, a stunning development but not a totally unexpected end to his conflicted career arc in Flushing.
Conflicted because Harvey's rise to the pinnacle of New York stardom was undone by myriad factors, some of his own design. There was the Tommy John surgery only three months after starting the 2013 All-Star Game at Citi Field. Three years later, Harvey had to be cut and repaired again, this time to correct thoracic outlet syndrome. Was the career-threatening injury the result of Harvey boldly pushing past his innings limit during the Mets' World Series run the previous October? Or just a coincidence?
"I have no way of knowing that," Alderson said Friday. "I don't know if anybody has any way of knowing that."
Does it matter? Now that Harvey is finished in Flushing, the point is at least worth mentioning as the Mets push him out the door. During Game 5 of the 2015 World Series, Harvey had a Citi Field crowd of 44,859 hanging on every one of his 111 pitches, chanting his name, wildly cheering each of his nine strikeouts through eight innings.
Little did we realize at the time that the October night was the perfect snapshot of Harvey's Mets career. The streaking-comet brilliance, fueled by New York's unconditional love, followed by the crash-and-burn curtain drop, brought on by Harvey persuading Terry Collins to let him close.
Harvey could be bigger than the Mets back then, because they would stomach the too-frequent misfirings of his ego, as long as his fastball still zipped past hitters at 98 mph and the hooking slider remained virtually unhittable. When Harvey made an obscene gesture while smiling from his hospital bed, the Mets laughed uncomfortably. When he repeatedly pushed their boundaries _ and the GM's buttons _ the Mets chose reluctantly to bend.
As soon as Harvey began to decline, however, the team's patience had an expiration date, and his relationship with Alderson _ already severely damaged _ was irreparably broken when he failed to show up for a May game at Citi Field. By then, Harvey had been reduced to ordinary on the mound, and both sides were counting the days until his free agency at the end of the 2018 season.
Even so, the Mets chose to roll the dice one more time with Harvey and tendered him a $5.63 million contract for this year. In the cost-benefit analysis, it wasn't a ton of money for a starting pitcher with Harvey's pedigree. And by hiring Callaway, maybe he could help squeeze out whatever Harvey had left. But the Mets demoted him to the bullpen after only four starts (6.00 ERA, .849 OPS) and Harvey flatly refused Friday's proposal to go to Triple-A Las Vegas to see if he could get right.
"We feel like we failed Matt Harvey," Callaway said.
It's more complicated than that, and Harvey never did himself any favors by being difficult _ a moody problem child for both his own team and the media that documented his every misstep, splashing him on the back page through the highs and lows. Last month, Harvey told off reporters, always a bad look in this city. But Thursday, after another sobering relief appearance, the confused Harvey was almost a sympathetic figure, a shadow of what we once knew.
Since that World Series burnout, Harvey is 9-19 with a 5.93 ERA, a resume that might have earned him a spring-training invite last winter. His fastball limps along at 93 mph now, his slider is a non-factor. He leaves the Mets as perhaps the most celebrated 34-37 pitcher in the sport's history.
Harvey Days stopped being special a while ago. On Friday, the Mets just treated him like anyone else no longer worth the trouble.
