QUEENS, NY — New York Mets starting pitcher Clay Holmes admitted that surgery is not off the table, but the plan moving forward is to let his fractured fibula heal.
“It’s looking there’s probably not going to be any surgery needed,” Holmes said on Sunday before the Subway Series finale against the Yankees. “I don’t think anything’s off the table really right now. We’re still gathering opinions and whatnot, but it doesn’t look that way.”
Potential surgical options include a reinforcing plate, among others.
“Things look like it will heal well,” Holmes, who suffered a similar injury in 2020, said. “It healed well for me last time. It’s not something we think is super real, but something that’s been done before. So you just can’t totally ignore it.”
Holmes suffered the injury in the fourth inning of Friday night’s loss to the Yankees, when Spencer Jones struck a 111 mph liner that hit his right leg. He was able to get through that inning, but quickly realized he would not be able to carry on much longer, as he was pulled with one out in the fifth.
“I kind of knew, walking off, that I thought it was broken,” Holmes said. “I was kind of expecting it, so wasn’t too surprised for the X-rays. But it caught me good. Had some hope there for a little bit, but the more I was throwing on it, it continued to get a little worse. I have some history with it and knew that it probably wasn’t great.”
The 33-year-old right-hander had been the Mets’ ace this season, in what was his second year with the club after a successful stint as the Yankees’ closer. In nine starts this year, he was 4-4 with a 2.39 ERA and was among MLB’s ERA leaders entering his start on Friday night.
“It’s tough,” Holmes said. “From a personal standpoint, I thought I was in a good spot with the body and arm. It’s hard to stay healthy in this game as it is. Then you add some freak accidents into these things that are out of your control, that can be tough.”
Holmes hopes to begin a throwing program in four to six weeks, but it cannot start until the leg is healed. There will have to be another round of imaging to confirm that, and only then can he begin his throwing progressions.
“Everyone’s different in that aspect. There’s never black and white,” Holmes said. “There’s never just a day where you wake up and the X-ray is just green. There’s a gray area there, so it’s just navigating that: How much it’s healed and when you can start to push it a little bit more and how it’s responding… If anything, that’s what I learned last time. You never just wake up one day and it’s like ‘Oh, we’re back now.’”
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