There have been few athletes feted by the city of New York in the way that Matt Harvey was in 2012 and 2013. If you want to go old school, we can talk about Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. Joe Namath, of course, and Reggie Jackson, Bernard King and Derek Jeter.
Then there is Jeremy Lin, a player who owned the headlines and imaginations of New York for a sliver of time, and then immediately disappeared. Right now, Harvey is on the verge of becoming the baseball version of Lin: He is at the crossroad of relevance, veering sharply toward irrelevance.