After 6 year hiatus, Mets prospect Allan is back on the mound

Matt Allan walked onto a mound Sunday to throw a pitch in a game for the first time in 2,046 days, a six-year gap caused by a pandemic and three major surgeries. "It was unreal, honestly. Nerves and everything that comes with it," the New York Mets prospect said. "But also just kind of gratitude." A right-hander who turns 24 on April 17, he returned Sunday for Class A St. Lucie, reaching 95-97 mph with his fastball and striking out five of 11 batters over 2 2/3 scoreless innings while allowing two hits. Selected by the Mets in the third round of the 2019 amateur draft and signed for a $2.5 million bonus, Allan had not pitched in a game since Aug. 31, 2019, for Class A Brooklyn. "It was very emotional," he said. His opportunity to pitch in 2020 was wiped out by the coronavirus pandemic, which caused the cancellation of all minor league seasons. He had Tommy John surgery on May 14, 2021, and right elbow ulnar nerve transposition surgery the following Jan. 11, both with Los Angeles Dodgers head team physician Dr. Neal ElAttrache. He then had Tommy John revision surgery on Jan. 7, 2023, with Texas Rangers team physician Dr. Keith Meister. "It was pretty hard when I went to see Dr. Meister," Allan recalled. "He kind of was just like: `The nerve surgery, the TJ, they were kind of like just failed from the jump. You had a degenerative ligament, just something that kind of happened throughout the process, and there's really nothing you could have done.' I pride myself on my character and my hard work and I've always kind of thought I can persevere. I can do anything." Allan pitched a perfect game with 17 strikeouts as a senior at Seminole High in Sanford, Florida. He caught the attention of Mets scout Jon Updike, who advocated for him with Marc Tramuta, then director of amateur scouting. Updike, who spent nine years with the Mets, saw Allan pitch about 15 times in high school. "He was the most-finished product I'd ever seen in high school from a physical standpoint, from preparation, how tough he was mentally and then just his pure stuff," Updike said. "He had as good or better stuff than anybody I was seeing in the the SEC or the ACC." Updike's conviction persuaded then-Mets general manager Brodie Van Wagenen to make the selection. "He believed not only in the talent, but he believed in the makeup and the competitiveness," Van Wagenen said. Van Wagenen wanted to pick three potential impact players and the Mets used their first two selections on infielder Brett Baty and right-hander Josh Wolf, who would be traded to Cleveland in 2021 as part of the swap that brought Francisco Lindor to New York. Allan had committed to the University of Florida and the Mets needed to create flexibility in their $8.22 million signing bonus pool to lure the high school senior and not incur penalties for going more than 5% over. Tramuta quickly executed a strategy in which the team would sign its fourth-through-10th-round picks for a total of $62,000, a fraction of the $1,819,900 slot value for those selections. "We had 15 minutes to rebuild the senior board," Updike remembered. Selected 89th overall in the draft, Allan made his professional debut that July 28 for the Gulf Coast League Mets. He pitched five times for the rookie level team and once for Brooklyn for a total of 10 1/3 innings. He knew his arm would be an issue. "I had an asymptomatic elbow," Allan said. "It wasn't significant enough that it would kind of hold me back from signing, but was also one of those things where it's like, OK, you're going to blow out at some point. It's just kind of inevitable." His 2020 action was limited to pitching against other Mets prospects in Brooklyn. New York thought highly of Allan and invited him to major league spring training in 2021 along with Baty, Francisco Alvarez and Ronny Mauricio. Allan made one big league exhibition appearance, retiring Washington's Kyle Schwarber on a groundout with his first pitch and giving up three runs — one earned — in his only inning. "They just gave me so much confidence to be like, 'Wow, my stuff really plays. My stuff can get guys out and I can have success,'" Allan said. "I kind of had it softly in my head of like: 'Hey, keep doing what you're doing. You'll be there soon, whether that's '21, '22, '23, whatever it was.'" Then came the injuries. After the third surgery, Allan spent January to May 2023 rehabbing at Meister's TMI Sports Medicine and Orthopedic Surgery outside Dallas, then worked at Cressey Sports Performance in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Grayson Crawford, the Mets assistant minor league pitching coordinator, worked to develop a plan for Allan with vice president of pitching Eric Jagers, minor league rehab pitching coach Jeremy Kivel and pitching and performance integration coordinator Kyle Rogers. The team's mental conditioning group assisted "to keep him in a head space of just pushing forward," according to Crawford. "It's really, really fun to watch him pitch right now," Crawford said. "Just his perseverance and his willingness to just kind of continue to go on." Allan relied primarily on his fastball and cutter against Jupiter on Sunday, staying away mostly from his curveball and slider. He is slated to pitch again Saturday at Lakeland. "I'm hoping to get a little more juice," he said. New York is willing to move him along slowly. "Given everything Matt's gone through, every time he takes the ball right now we're just happy," president of baseball operations David Stearns said. "What he is doing right now is really impressive and he's demonstrating why he was so sought after out of the draft and why he has kept pushing so hard for the last five years to get back to this point." ___ AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB