Mets ace Matt Harvey takes aim at haters who criticize his lifestyle

The man goes by the nickname Dark Knight, so of course there will be haters. But for New York Mets ace Matt Harvey, he believes his critics are merely jealous on the righty's fame.

"I'm not going to give up enjoying my life and doing the things that I'm interested in doing," Harvey told the New York Post. "I'm not getting caught in a club at 2 o'clock in the morning. I'm going to basketball games and hockey games and going to events and dinners. [The scrutiny] might be jealousy. I don't know. Nobody knows the hard work that goes in the morning before I do anything. You can only work out for so many hours a day."

Harvey helped the Mets reach the World Series last year, further thrusting the 26-year-old into the spotlight. But he was already pretty comfortable on center stage, dating high-profile models and posing naked in ESPN the Magazine's Body Issue. Harvey admits not every move has been perfect.

'You can only work out for so many hours a day,' Matt Harvey.

"I think there's a lot of learning process in figuring out what things you want to do and shouldn't do. Maturing in that way is something that comes with experience and time," he says, his hazel-blue eyes sparkling. "I did some things, including the Body Issue. I'm not going to say I regret doing that, but I think now if you asked me to do it, I would probably say no. It's just something fun to do when you're a little bit younger. But I think there have been a couple of articles that came out that I wish I maybe had had a little more insight [into], maybe that I [had been] a little more careful."

Harvey should be fully recovered from his Tommy John surgery, which forced him to sit out the entire 2014 season and put him on an innings limit last year. Despite the limit, Harvey went 13-8 with a 2.71 ERA in a career-high 189.1 innings, not including the playoffs.