Amazin’s dealing with Dark Fright
IT is one thing to celebrate being Comeback Kids, quite another to recognize that there never used to be a need for any comeback with Matt Harvey on the mound.
Whatever it was that the Dark Knight had found following his springtime nightmare he has lost again, and even as the surging Mets closed to within four games of the Nationals with an 8-6 victory over the Marlins, thanks to a tiebreaking double in the eighth by Yoenis Cespedes, the fact the alpha dog’s bark was once again worse than his bite was not lost on manager Terry Collins and pitching coach Dan Warthen, nor should it be. And it sure wasn’t lost on Harvey.
On a day when Citi Field was looking for fireworks from him, Harvey was a dud, booed off the mound when Collins mercifully took the ball from him in the fourth inning, trailing 6-0 and looking like a 4-10 pitcher who deserved to be 4-11, saved by his team’s refuse-to-lose resilience and by his bullpen.
You decide which of Harvey’s postgame remarks are the most alarming:
“From start to start things are not feeling the same.”
“You go through ups and downs. Unfortunately, this year there’s been more downs than there are ups. But we still got a long way to go and a lot more starts left, so we’ll kinda go back to the drawing board, like I have many times, and figure out how we can go back to the Washington start for that brief time [3 2/3 innings cut short by rain delay] and figure out how to keep that going.”
“Whether it was a slider or curveball or changeup or fastball, everything was just out of whack, and catching too much of the plate.”
Harvey lost his command in the second, watched the Marlins rake four consecutive hits, three of them following a successful challenge by Don Mattingly, and before you could say Dark Fright, it was Marlins 3, Mets 0. His fastball, which had reached 98 mph in the first inning, had settled in at 95-96 mph by the third.
Harvey fell behind Chris Johnson 3-0 leading off the fourth before surrendering a line single to right. He had already thrown 62 pitches to that point, had yielded an RBI single to pitcher Tom Koehler, and was working on a nifty eight-hitter.
It became 4-0 when he fielded a comebacker and uncorked his worst pitch of the day — low and wide to Travis d’Arnaud trying for a bases-loaded force at the plate. E1.
“Yeah I probably just rushed it, tried to be too quick and yanked it a little bit,” Harvey said.
Collins chuckled when first asked whether there is any level of concern with Harvey. But it’s no laughing matter.
“I don’t know if you were at the Washington game the other day, if you’da saw him throw the other night, the answer’s no,” Collins said. “And then tonight, command wasn’t good, a lot of balls in the middle of the plate, couldn’t make his pitch, didn’t have the late life that we normally see. I told Dan when he came out, I said, ‘It’s back to the drawing board.’ You gotta go back and try to remake something that you did two weeks ago that made him look so good in Washington.
“I’d have to say there’s some concern, yeah.”
The only good news: no bone spur, and he lined a single in his lone at-bat, a sign he didn’t let his pitching affect his hitting.
The Mets have been waiting for Jose Reyes to feel more comfortable at the plate and at third base, and are summoning him for leadoff duty Tuesday.
“He was a dynamic player, he was a guy that you targeted as an opponent, that he could hurt you in so many different ways,” Neil Walker said. “Five-, six-tool guy really — beat you with speed, beat you with power ... seemed to be in the middle of every big inning, every kind of rally ... so certainly a guy that you were very aware of as an opposing player.”
The 32-year-old Reyes is no longer that guy. He’ll bring speed, energy and the kind of joy that Brandon Nimmo has brought, but the days of him electrifying Citi Field on a regular basis are mostly over.
More critical than Reyes’ homecoming, and the return sometime after the All-Star break of Michael Conforto and Lucas Duda, is the once-and-for-all return of the sneering, dominant Dark Knight.
“It was obviously fun watching the team battle back like that, it showed a lot of character and a lot of heart,” Harvey said, “and unfortunately, I couldn’t get it done when I was out there, but we gotta keep pushing and keep going.”
There is no time for him and Warthen to wait. The Nationals are next.
“It’ll start [Tuesday],” Harvey said.
Collins said he was thrilled the Mets suffered no letdown after the four-game sweep of the Cubs. It was Harvey who suffered the letdown. In a World Series-OrBust season, it will be Bust without him.