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Image credit: © Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports
If you’re puzzled as to why Billy Eppler was singled out for punishment last week, you’re not alone. According to Major League Baseball, the former general manager of the Mets was placed on the Ineligible List for the 2024 season due to “improper use of Injured List placements, including the deliberate fabrication of injuries; and the associated submission of documentation for the purposes of securing multiple improper Injured List placements during the 2022 and 2023 seasons.” GMs and POBOs putting players on the “phantom IL” is not exactly a new story. When Giants pitcher Ross Stripling literally told reporters that he was on the phantom IL in September, it didn’t trigger an investigation into San Francisco’s IL usage. As Tommy Hunter, who played under Eppler in both seasons, told the New York Post, “It’s crazy Billy got singled out. It’s kind of mind-blowing….It’s no secret what goes on [with the phantom IL], so to go after one person seems unfair.”
We can now reveal the reason that Eppler and Eppler alone ended up in hot water, and—like so many New York Mets injuries over the past two seasons—it is entirely fictitious. Eppler is far from the only executive to put players on the phantom IL, but his crime seems to have been that he sought to elevate this mundane practice into an art form. He didn’t just attribute the same boring strains and sprains to his players. The injuries were fabricated in the truest sense of the word: Eppler invented radical new maladies unknown to medical science. Using inventive language and powerful imagery, he conjured shocking combinations of symptoms and body parts that no lesser GM could have even conceived of, let alone typed into an official medical database. His medico-linguistic innovations were breathtaking. They disturbed the comfortable. They disturbed the disturbed even further. In short, Eppler was punished for that most daring of crimes: poetry.
In 2022, the Mets became the first team ever to lose a player to sinistrosomatic osteomegaly, a previously unknown condition that, according to Eppler, is marked by a dramatic increase in the size of the bones on the left side of the body. In 2023, a middle reliever came down with an acute fracture of the hippocampus, but due to either a miraculous recovery or the fact that his IL stint was retroactive to a week earlier, he returned just three days later, seemingly with a fully functional limbic system. The price of Eppler’s radical creativity was steep, but that should come as no surprise. As a fictionalized version of an MLB owner once said, “the first guy through the wall, he always gets bloody. Always.”
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