Mets' Jose Quintana to have rib surgery after benign lesion found
New York Mets pitcher Jose Quintana pauses during spring training baseball practice Monday, Feb. 20, 2023, in Port St. Lucie, Fla. Credit: AP/Jeff Roberson
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. -- Mets lefthander Jose Quintana suffered a stress fracture in a rib on his left side while pitching in a spring training game on March 5.
A bad baseball injury. But what Quintana faced next was even more scary.
Mets doctors discovered a lesion on the 34-year-old Quintana’s rib. A biopsy was taken at Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Thankfully, the biopsy came back benign. No cancer was detected.
“This took on a human element,” Mets general manager Billy Eppler said on Tuesday. “This was bigger than baseball.”
The next step for Quintana, the doctors and the Mets was to decide how to treat the injury. Eppler revealed on Tuesday that Quintana will undergo surgery on Friday that includes a bone graft.
Quintana will not pitch for the Mets until July 1 at the earliest, Eppler said. But that was not the team’s top priority.
“We were waiting a number of days and that is part of the reason why there was a delay in talking about his status,” Eppler said. “We got the results of the biopsy back. Benign. So that’s great for Jose as a human and as a husband and as a father. That’s the most important thing.”
The Mets signed Quintana to a two-year, $26-million free agent contract in the offseason. Quintana, who returned to the club on Tuesday, was not available for comment.
Mets manager Buck Showalter said Quintana’s spirits were “pretty good . . . He’ll be back and we look forward to getting him back.”
Eppler detailed the sequence of events from March 5 to Tuesday:
“We received the original scan and that original scan showed that he had a stress fracture on the fifth rib. When looking at the scan, our orthopedist saw something that was a little concerning. There was a lesion on that rib. So we then took Jose and took him up to New York City so he can get looked at by an orthopedic tumor specialist. So that orthopedic tumor specialist ran through a series of scans and tests, as well as the biopsy.”
Once the biopsy came back as benign, Eppler said, “That presented us with a couple of different treatment options. We could go the conservative care route, and that route I think came with a little bit more risk for it to naturally heal. Or we could go with a surgical route, and it's going to have a little bit higher probability that this thing completely heals. What the doctor will do in that surgery is to perform a bone graft. He'll have to take bone from another area, kind of packing in that lesion and that area around the stress fracture, in order to kind of reinforce the healing. And so Jose opted to go that that route.”
Eppler said he was told by doctors that the conservative treatment option, which would have included rest and no surgery, had a lower certainty of healing the area because of the lesion.
“This was a situation that could have turned it in a bad place for him and his family,” Eppler said. “So I'm going to always kind of put that at the forefront of everything.”
The Mets are well-positioned to replace Quintana in the rotation with either righthander Tylor Megill (1.08 spring training ERA after four shutout innings vs. Miami on Monday) or lefthander David Peterson (0.00 spring training ERA after four no-hit innings in the Mets’ 5-0 loss to Washington on Tuesday).
Trainer’s room. The Mets hope Francisco Alvarez is OK after he was hit in the glove hand on a backswing while catching Tuesday. “When I first got out there, I couldn’t tell if his hand was swollen or he had that meaty a hand,” Showalter said. “I think it’s that meaty a hand.” . . . Starling Marte returned to the lineup two days after getting hit in the helmet with a pitch and went 0-for-2 . . . Kodai Senga (tendinitis, right finger) threw a bullpen session and could pitch in a game as early as Thursday . . . Reliever Bryce Montes de Oca, who left Sunday’s game with forearm discomfort, will be shut down for 3-4 weeks with a stress reaction in his elbow. An MRI showed no ligament damage . . . The Mets sent Rule 5 pick Zach Greene back to the Yankees. Greene had a 13.50 spring training ERA.
Anthony Rieber covers sports media and business and professional sports (you know, games and trades and things). He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since Jan. 1, 2026.
