PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Johan Santana will be making $25.5 million in the sixth and final year of his enormous contract with the Mets. But it is highly unlikely that he will throw a pitch for the club this season and it is unclear if he will pitch again in the major leagues.
Instead, the 34-year-old Santana, a two-time Cy Young Award winner, will probably spend the season rehabilitating a new tear in his pitching shoulder, which Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson disclosed in a conference call Thursday evening.
The injury, a recurrence of the issue that led him to miss all of the 2011 season, adds an unhappy final chapter to his time with the Mets. The team acquired him in a trade with the Minnesota Twins in the winter of 2008, signed him to a $137.5 million contract — the remainder of which Alderson said was not insured — and then watched as physical ailments began to cut into his effectiveness after a strong first season in Queens.
To some degree, the announcement was not a big surprise because Santana had reported weakness in his pitching shoulder since arriving at spring training. He had not pitched in a single exhibition game and, under the best-case picture, was not expected to pitch in the regular season until late April or late May. Now it appears he will not pitch at all.
"I'm not a doctor nor am I a medical historian," Alderson said in the conference call, "but these injuries are very difficult to recover from after one surgery, and I don't know the history of recovering from a second."
Alderson said Santana had flown to New York on Wednesday to consult with Dr. David Altchek, the Mets' team physician, who performed a magnetic resonance imaging exam on Santana's left shoulder and concluded that he had retorn the anterior capsule. Alderson said that Altchek, at the request of Santana's agent, Peter Greenberg, then reviewed the M.R.I. with two prominent sports orthopedists — Dr. James Andrews and Dr. Lewis Yocum — and that both had agreed with Altchek's assessment.
Alderson said Santana would remain in New York over the weekend as he decided his next step. "A second surgery is a strong possibility," Alderson said.
Santana had hoped to represent Venezuela in March in the World Baseball Classic but encountered a succession of negative developments once he reported to camp. At one point, in early March, Alderson even questioned if Santana had reported to camp in proper shape. The comment did not sit well with Santana, who, perhaps unwisely, threw a bullpen session to try to prove a point.
Alderson spent part of Thursday's conference call trying to clarify how everything had deteriorated so quickly.
"We don't know when it happened or how it happened," he said, "but we do know that at some point the symptoms worsened."
Asked if the bullpen session might have contributed to the new diagnosis, Alderson said, "We just don't have facts."
The disclosure is more of a blow to Santana, who had been thought of as a potential Hall of Famer, than it is to the Mets, who did not have great ambitions for the 2013 season and were not counting on Santana to propel them into the postseason. The Mets are looking to turn things around in 2014, with a core of young players that was clearly not going to include Santana.
If he does not pitch again for the Mets, Santana will be remembered for two games. The most recent came last June, when he pitched the first no-hitter in the team's history. But it was a bittersweet accomplishment because he was forced to throw 134 pitches to get through nine innings, substantially more than the Mets wanted him to throw at that point in the wake of his first shoulder surgery.
After that game, Manager Terry Collins expressed misgivings about what harm might have been done, and his instincts might have been correct. In the 10 games he started after the no-hitter, Santana had an earned run average of 8.28, and he was eventually shut down for the season.
Santana's other standout effort came in the next-to-last game of the 2008 season, his first in New York, when the Mets were in the process of collapsing for the second September in a row. Against the Marlins, with his team reeling, Santana pitched a three-hit, 2-0 shutout. The victory temporarily drew the Mets even in the wild-card standings, although they proceeded to lose the next day, finishing out of the postseason.
It turned out that Santana pitched the game against the Marlins with a torn meniscus in his left knee. That injury was easily repaired. His damaged shoulder, however, is a different story.
The Mets have one more vacancy to address in a starting rotation that now leans heavily on two young pitchers: Jon Niese and Matt Harvey.
Dillon Gee still has to prove he is capable after having surgery last season for a blood clot in his pitching shoulder, and Shaun Marcum, acquired in the off-season, is sidelined with a neck ailment.
"We'll just have to see," said Alderson, which is about all he could say at the end of one more sobering day for his team.
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