Matt Harvey And Baseball's Briefest-Burning Flames

The Dark Knight's career went permanently dark Friday.

For New York Mets fans in the early-to-mid-2010s, there was no day quite like a Harvey Day.

The team was not good — it posted identical 74-88 records in each of Matt Harvey’s first two MLB seasons — but when Harvey took the mound, it had a fighting chance. No, the Mets didn’t lack for other talented pitchers; R.A. Dickey won his Cy Young in Harvey’s rookie year, and Johan Santana threw his no-hitter that summer as well. But Harvey was so overwhelming as a young hurler, with his league-leading 2.01 FIP and 6.2 K-to-BB ratio in 2013, that he recalled the very best Mets pitchers in history, Doc Gooden and Tom Seaver.

Of course, that was a decade ago, and it feels like even longer. Harvey hasn’t been a Met since 2018, nor has he thrown a pitch for any MLB team since Sept. 8, 2021. (He did pitch for Italy in the World Baseball Classic.) Coming off a drug suspension at age 34, and unable to latch on with an MLB team, Harvey announced on Friday that he was retiring from the sport.

The story of Harvey’s career is one of what-ifs. (He acknowledged as much in his goodbye note: "Believe me I wish I could have done more and brought more of those amazing moments back to life.”) He will go down as scarcely scratching the surface of his potential — something we can see clearly illustrated in his career stats.