Mets’ Yoenis Cespedes to Undergo Season-Ending Surgery

Yoenis Cespedes, the Mets’ best hitter and highest paid player, will miss the remainder of this season and a good chunk of next season because of surgeries on both of his troublesome heels. Even to those numb from the repeated blows of another dismal Mets season, the announcement on Wednesday was significant.

The surgeries will remove bone spurs and calcification near the Achilles’ tendon in the outfielder’s heels. The decision resolves an awkward episode that began late last week when Cespedes voiced uncertainty about his ability to play through continued pain on the very day he returned to the Mets from the disabled list.

Although he has dealt with heel pain for his entire career, dating to his playing days in Cuba, it has worsened and been identified as a root cause of his recurring leg injuries. There is little to play for this season, anyway: The Mets are 42-57 after their 6-4 victory on Wednesday afternoon over the San Diego Padres, a matchup of two of the worst teams in baseball.

“I knew that it was the only thing that was going to fix me,” Cespedes said at a news conference on Wednesday morning with John Ricco, the team’s assistant general manager, sitting to his right and Jeff Wilpon, the team’s chief operating officer, off to the side of the room. “I hoped for surgery only until after I retired. But it reached a point that I just couldn’t keep playing anymore.”

The timetable for recovery is eight to 10 months, but that was speculative, said Ricco, one of three executives in charge of the team since General Manager Sandy Alderson stepped down last month after a recurrence of cancer.

“It’s possible it could be longer than that,” Ricco added. “It probably won’t be shorter than that. We’ll know more when the surgery has occurred and when the doctors know the extent of the calcification.”

Once the surgery is scheduled, it will be performed by Robert Anderson, a foot specialist in Green Bay, Wis. The operation will occur in two parts: on one foot and then the other two or three months later, Ricco said.

Ricco said the Mets have a medical insurance policy for Cespedes’s four-year, $110 million contract, of which he is in his second year. The policy is similar to one in which the Mets will recoup 75 percent of the salary of third baseman David Wright, who has not played in over two years because of several injuries. Ricco said the team had not yet determined how the recouped money would be used, such as future payroll.

Even though Cespedes’s extended absence will affect the Mets’ hopes of contending for the playoffs next season, Ricco suggested that the new development was unlikely to push them toward a larger tear down ahead of the July 31 trade deadline. The Mets traded closer Jeurys Familia to the Oakland Athletics last week, and a few more modest trades are likely.

“Going into the off-season, it’ll probably change some of our thoughts on how we field a team next year,” Manager Mickey Callaway said. “I’m sure we’ll have discussions about that. Missing a big impact bat for most of this year and what looks like part of next year is tough.”

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, Cespedes, a two-time All-Star, has struggled to stay on the field. His placement on the disabled list on Monday is his fifth for a leg-related ailment as a Met.

The Mets re-signed Cespedes twice, including before the 2017 season, but he has played in fewer than half of the team’s games since signing that deal. In 38 games this season, he hit .262 with nine home runs, 29 runs batted in and an .821 on-base plus slugging percentage.

This clumsy episode started on Friday night. After his first game back from a hip injury that sidelined him for two months, Cespedes said he did not know if he could survive the rest of the season at this rate and mentioned surgery. It was known that Cespedes had long dealt with heel problems, but never to this degree.

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, Callaway said the next day that he was unaware of Cespedes’s comments. (He later said that he misspoke.) Also, a Mets executive did not address the Cespedes situation until Sunday evening, contributing to nearly two days of confusion that raised questions about the team’s decentralized operation and history of mishandling injuries.

Until now, heel surgery was seen as a last resort for Cespedes. He visited a foot specialist last month, and the pain was considered to be manageable, as it had been before, with the help of shoe inserts, stretching and anti-inflammatories. But after Friday’s game, which was preceded by a long rehabilitation, Cespedes knew he could not continue like this any longer.

So 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 Anderson, which delayed an announcement until Wednesday, one that felt inevitable after Cespedes first voiced his concern five days ago.

Although he faces a long recovery, Cespedes said he was looking forward to returning to the field without pain. Ricco said there was “a little bit of disappointment” that the less invasive options failed because the Mets would rather have Cespedes play. Even hobbled, Cespedes notched two hits, including a home run, on Friday.

“The concern on our end was not just the pain he was in but also contributing to him altering his running style, and therefore leading to some of these other leg issues,” Ricco said. “That just doesn’t make sense since you’ll just keep in that cycle.”

Hence, the consensus among doctors on the current route.

“As to whether this surgery completely heals it, there’s no guarantees,” Ricco said. “But one thing assured: This is the only option we have at this point.”