Good news for Marte in recovery from right knee injury

MIAMI -- Starling Marte feels “close” to returning to play, the outfielder told reporters on Saturday prior to the Mets’ game against the Marlins. On Friday, Marte began baseball activities for the first time since he was sidelined with a right knee bone bruise in late June.

So far, Marte’s baseball activities have included playing catch and hitting off a tee -- low-impact activities he can do as his pain tolerates. But he is itching to get back into game action, and he heard some good news suggesting he could be closer than anticipated.

“Yeah, I think I’m close,” Marte said via interpreter Alan Suriel. “Yesterday after meeting with the doctors and looking over my knee, he gave me good news. I’ll continue to work out with the trainers, but it’s also about being able to catch the rhythm and trying to get into a new rhythm.”

Friday marked the first time Marte participated in any baseball activity since he exited the Mets’ June 22 game against the Cubs with what was at the time deemed right knee soreness, then later determined to be a bone bruise.

This leads back to that “good news” Marte mentioned.

“[The doctors] said that the knee actually looks a lot better,” Marte said. “There’s still a little bit of inflammation around there, but it’s one of those things that, with the proper training methods and all that, it’s going to eventually subside.”

Marte, who has dealt with his fair share of injuries in the past few years -- including migraines and a groin strain in 2023 and a finger fracture in ‘22 -- hasn’t played 120 or more regular-season games in a year since 2021, when he was with the Marlins before being dealt to the Athletics at the Trade Deadline.

In 2022, Marte was cruising with a .292 average before he missed part of the final month of the season with the finger fracture. The same thing happened this year: Marte was hitting .278 with seven home runs in 66 games, already exceeding his homer total from 2023 (five) in 20 fewer games before landing on the IL.

After his multiple injuries over the past few years, Marte and the Mets entered Spring Training this season looking to keep him as healthy as possible.

“It looked really really bad, [and] the doctor said that it was best to shut it down,” Marte said of the initial diagnosis, “because the way that I was playing, it could have given out at any moment. It wasn’t something I expected, it was kind of a surprise.

“There was one day I woke up with knee pain, and maybe it was from running a lot, stealing a lot of bases, whether it was diving or things like that, but it got to the point where it was hurting … and I thought it would go away, but it just never did. When the doctors looked at the imaging, they said they were surprised by how much I was able to play on it, because they did think that at some point [if I had continued to play], the bone could have given out.”

According to the New York Sports Medicine Institute, there are three types of bone bruises: subchondral, subperiosteal and interosseous. The latter is likely what Marte is suffering, a type of bone bruise that typically impacts athletes in the elbows and knees and that “is caused by compressive, repetitive impact to a particular area and results in bone marrow damage.”

Marte explained that doctors thought that his playing through the early knee pain -- as Marte said, “playing on a bad knee” -- led to the bone bruise.

“Just kind of in the style that I play,” Marte said, “where I run a lot, change direction a lot, so all that force was making me overcompensate on parts of the muscles in my leg, and that’s probably what ended up happening.”

But just because his playing style might have exacerbated the injury doesn’t mean Marte has any plans on playing less or changing his approach once he’s back in action.

“It doesn’t help anyone for me to try to rush this injury and get back on the field again just to get hurt again,” Marte said. “I don’t know when [I’ll be back], but obviously the sooner the better.”