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.”
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.
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
“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 in January 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. Tramuto 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.