The Cruelest Devil: Lessons from the Tragic Fall of Matt Harvey

If you’ve followed the news of late, the once heralded baseball phenom Matt Harvey, had to testify in a Texas courtroom last week about his own history of drug use and his sharing of prescription painkillers with teammates. One of those teammates, Tyler Skaggs died at the age of 27 in 2019, and Harvey, who had once been a star for the New York Mets from 2012-18, was a prosecution witness in the trial of a Los Angeles Angels staffer who had provided oxycodone to Skaggs, Harvey, and others. Skaggs is dead, a young life cut tragically short. Harvey is objectively the lucky one because he’s alive but his long descent is a tragedy of its own. It is one of his own making but it offers lessons, cautionary tales always do.

Harvey’s fall is one that hits close to me, not because I know him or have a friendship with him, but because his rise brought so much joy to me at a time when I needed it. Such is the remote yet personal relationship fans have with the athletes they follow. Harvey was the symbol of all things resurgent when he was called up to the New York Mets, the team that bears both my memories of past summers and the joy of future ones.

Fandom comes harder for me. I am more or less in the business and pro sports are an often cold business, not really a place for the mushy impractical feelings of fandom.

But there was a cool early April night in 2013, I sat in then Mets’ owner Fred Wilpon’s box at Citi Field. as the then 24-year old Harvey dominated the Padres over 7 scoreless innings. I was mingling in heady company, joining NYU President John Sexton, famed law professor Arthur Miller, and several sports faculty colleagues from a then ascendent school. It was different for me, the lone lifelong Mets fan in the box. Harvey’s electric fastball signaled that the Mets would no longer be a post-Madoff tragedy of their own. Harvey would soon rise as “the Dark Knight,” start the All-Star game in his home park, and be the toast of New York. Ranger games, dates with supermodels, for him, not me, soon followed. Perhaps too soon.

Either way, the joy of that night would be short-lived for both of us. Harvey soon succumbed to a drop in velocity, elbow troubles, and Tommy John surgery and he would miss the next 18 months. My joy too would detour in the kind of ridiculous dysfunction only academic politics at a university can fall into and the ascendent program of April 2013 was stifled by administrative paralysis during 2014 which also marked the unraveling of my decade-plus, mostly happy first marriage, too. It is hard to say how one affected the other. It seems neither of Harvey or I could defy all the odds.

But then there was that sunny late April day in 2015, in Yankee Stadium, a bright “Harvey Day,” as the now 26-year old Harvey in his fourth start, and victory, after missing the prior season pitched into the 9th against the hated Yankees. The warmth of the sun and unseasonable temperatures along with Harvey’s mastery seemed to symbolize fresh starts. And when I embarked on a new adventure to lead the historically first and best program in my field at Ohio University at the end of the summer, little did I know that I’d be a short drive from watching Harvey on the mound against the Reds to clinch a title within a month. By the time the Mets played in the World Series that October, I’d met the woman who would be my wife, not surprisingly the night of a Mets game, the NL Divisional clincher against the Dodgers. Harvey’s dream comeback season would end with him asking to take the mound in ninth inning of the final game of the World Series, close enough to sniff the ultimate prize, but not before showing cracks in the facade.

The years since have been kinder to me than they have been to Harvey. I also know who I am and while I am fortunate to have some talents, I am not cursed with greatness. Harvey has not been nearly so lucky.

A Mets hero of an older generation, Keith Hernandez once called, “cocaine the devil on this earth.” Hernandez triumphed over his devil and led the Mets to a World Series win. Harvey admitted to battling the same one in that Texas courtroom and that admission may end his career. He’s no longer the blazing star but an injury-riddled fringe player, now in his 30s, trying to hang on and he now faces a lengthy suspension.

Devils and baseball have some history together. In the famed musical, “Damn Yankees,” a middle-aged fan, Joe Boyd, makes a deal with the devil, to come back as the supremely talented young star, Joe Hardy, to lead his hapless but beloved Washington Senators to a pennant over those damn Yankees. But in the real-life version, it isn’t the middle-aged fan who makes the deal with the devil or is the one who was cursed. The far crueler devil is the one who gave Harvey the ability to flirt with greatness, to lift the hopes of a city of fans onto his shoulders, and then to have it slip through his fingers.

I wish I could offer some wisdom or solace to Harvey for the joy he brought me in our shared comeback season. But he has to find his own way forward now. His hardest outing, the journey from precocious talent to full-fledged adult against the burdens of addiction and time, awaits. Whether he ever takes the mound again, I wish him luck and I’ll cheer because of the joy he brought me. I hope he can become a person that he can live with.

Perhaps “Damn Yankees,” offers the best description of what the talented feel and why talent is to be navigated, feared, and managed. It’s not “Ya Gotta to Have Heart,” that’s for the rest of us normal people for whom a bit of pluck will create a good moment. It is the non-sequitur number slipped in the show by its choreographer and star, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, a conspicuously talented pair, called, “Who’s Got the Pain,” the pain of expectations, the pain of failure, the pain of not living up to that, the pain of losing all of that is the most correct. Perhaps the cruelest devil is the weight the pain of coping with the gap between who one is and one’s potential.