David Wright's Back in New York to See Doctors

Wright pulled himself out of the World Baseball Classic with rib soreness

Given some of the misadventures of the recent past with the Mets medical staff, it's safe to say that no Mets fans were thrilled to hear the news that David Wright left the U.S. team in the World Baseball Classic to go see Mets doctors in New York. 

The word is soreness in the left rib cage area, something that apparently started bothering Wright a week ago and something he finally brought to the attention of the Mets on Thursday. He's been able to play in games for the U.S. team with the injury, which suggests it isn't all that serious but we again cite the past history as the reason why were aren't assuming anything at this point. 

We will say that it would seem to be time for a pretty serious rethinking of the whole World Baseball Classic concept if Wright actually thought that it was okay to play while injured in exhibition games less than a month before the start of the regular season.

Players get hurt all the time, but it is hard to believe that the Mets would have let Wright keep playing in spring training games with any soreness at all and equally difficult to believe that he would have just decided to keep the injury to himself. 

How do we know? Because Wright went through pretty much the same thing in 2012 and it resulted in a limited schedule for him in Port St. Lucie. 

We're all for global sports competitions and a true World Cup of baseball would be a pretty glorious thing, but it simply doesn't work as currently constructed. You can't draw the best players from several countries because of the conflicts with the run-up to the big league season and, as Wright's predicament illustrates, you can't keep world class athletes from competing at a high level when you tell them the games mean something. 

The Mets and their fans can't complain about the injury (or Mark Teixeira's, for that matter) but they can grumble at Wright being in a position to try to play through the pain. He's gotten dubbed Captain America, a great nickname that hopefully sticks around even though it's existence is almost certainly what caused Wright to push himself to a point where he's not on the field two weeks before the season starts. 

Josh Alper is also a writer for Pro Football Talk. You can follow him on Twitter.

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