Allan leaning on fellow Mets prospect Ginn during TJ rehab

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. -- Shortly after receiving his diagnosis of a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament last May, and once he had called his parents to deliver the news, No. 4 Mets prospect Matt Allan reached out to fifth-ranked J.T. Ginn. Drafted the year after Allan, Ginn had already begun his Tommy John rehab when the Mets selected him. He understood Allan’s situation as well as anyone on earth.

“He told me that he was joining the club,” Ginn recalled.

While this was far from the news that Ginn wanted to hear, it wasn’t particularly surprising. Those close to Allan knew he had been battling elbow discomfort as far back as high school; Allan said he first partially tore his ligament when he was around 15 years old, making it only “a matter of time before something was going to happen.” That something finally happened in a game late last spring, as Allan prepared to travel to Asheville, N.C. for High-A Brooklyn’s Opening Day. Experiencing elbow discomfort, Allan notified Mets officials, who supervised a brief attempt to rehab the ligament before Allan required Tommy John surgery.

Next came the call to his parents, then the call to Ginn.

“He’s been awesome just to be able to basically walk me through [it],” Allan said. “You have tough days in rehab. It’s not every day you’re going to feel great. It’s not every day your range of motion is going to feel great, lifting is going to feel great. It’s just not reality.”

Unlike Ginn, who enjoyed a relatively seamless rehab from surgery, Allan required a follow-up operation this winter to transpose his ulnar collateral nerve. It’s a common procedure that many Tommy John patients, including Jacob deGrom, Zack Wheeler and Steven Matz, eventually undergo. Nor should it affect the timeline of Allan, whom Mets officials believe can return to game action late this year.

“It’s incredible how much better I feel now,” said Allan, who hopes to restart his throwing program in early March.

The Mets are certainly eager to have both Allan and Ginn healthy, considering those two were the linchpins of an aggressive Draft strategy under ex-general manager Brodie Van Wagenen from 2019-20. During the first of those drafts, the Mets selected Allan in the third round despite signability concerns, drafting cheaply in other areas so that they could deliver Allan a $2.5 million bonus -- nearly four times the slot value for his pick. A year later, the Mets used a similar tactic to scoop up Ginn, who fell to the second round because of his operation. Again, the team went well over slot to sign Ginn at $2.9 million.

Those two are now far and away the highest-profile pitching prospects in the organization, giving the Mets hope that they can add multiple homegrown aces to their big league staff in the not-so-distant future. Ginn, a 22-year-old who returned to make 18 starts across Low-A and High-A last season, should arrive first -- likely at some point in 2023. Allan, 20, hopes to reach New York as soon as he can after that.

“Anytime you go through a TJ rehab, the most important thing is making sure that the ligament heals properly and that you’re feeling good, you’re feeling strong, you’re feeling confident,” Allan said. “There’s really no point in someone of my age to push. There’s no real gain. And so I think everybody kind of sees it that way.”

Ginn understood it when he went through his rehab. Allan, thanks in part to some advice from his teammate, knows this as well.

“I think as I’ve gotten a little older and mature, you just start to realize the bigger picture of baseball,” Allan said. “You don’t want to pitch in Double-A and that’s it. You want to pitch 10 or 12 years in the big leagues and be a Hall of Famer, be someone like Jacob deGrom that people can remember.”