After Matt Harvey endured the worst start of his major league career on Saturday, Terry Collins told reporters that “pitching on regular rest played a role” in what transpired.
Harvey, who made it known before the game he unhappy about the six-man rotation, gave up six hits including two homers, two walks and seven runs in four innings.
“You’ve got to look at everything. He’ll say no, I’m sure. But there’s no reason to think it’s not a factor,” Collins told reporters.
Prior to the game, Collins held a meeting with the team’s other four starting pitchers about how the six-man rotation will work when Dillon Gee returns from the disabled list on Sunday and gets the start next Friday.
Meanwhile, despite plenty of data that shows Harvey is more effective on five days rest rather than four, the Mets ace wasn’t budging and attributed his performance on Saturday to just a terrible outing and a bad day due to his inability to spot any of his pitches.
“Everything was kind of all over the place. I wasn’t locating, obviously. Arm feels fine, body feels fine,” Harvey said after the game. “One of those days…”
Harvey picked a bad day to have his worst outing, and regardless of his feelings on the matter the Mets are proceeding with the six-man rotation beginning on Friday.
Throughout his career Harvey has pitched to a 2.94 ERA on four days of rest. But with an extra day of rest his ERA improves to 2.04, and with two extra days of rest he has a 1.07 ERA in nine starts. It’s tough to dismiss that.
May 23
It was tough not to notice the following item about Matt Harvey while reading Adam Rubin’s Morning Briefing today:
“Matt Harvey has every reason to be perturbed. He has tossed a career-high-matching 16 straight scoreless innings, yet has no-decisions in each of his past two starts. And now the New York Mets are expected to go to a six-man rotation, which will decrease his opportunities to pitch — displeasing him.”
Then this morning, one of our readers (Brian) emailed me the following excerpt from an article about the six-man rotation by Anthony DiComo of MLB.com:
“There are still plenty of kinks to be worked out with that strategy. Collins said that when Harvey saw the news on Twitter, he marched into the manager’s office to demand an explanation. Syndergaard wouldn’t say if he already knew before the game that he was sticking with the Mets; at the time, he was preparing for his start by watching a “Game of Thrones” episode on his tablet.”
It appears that Harvey may not be totally onboard with the recent scuttlebutt about the Mets employing a six-man rotation. But the Mets ace has always put the team first from day one, that much is true.
I’m trying like hell to understand why Terry Collins would volunteer that private incident between him and Harvey, especially knowing how something like that can become overly dramatized by the media.
It puts Harvey in a poor light and there’s no doubt that he will probably be confronted about it this afternoon on a day when he should be 100 percent focused on his start tonight.
It’s stuff like this that really gnaws at me about Collins. He’s always yapping and frequently says things he should just keep to himself. He never knows when to shut up. It drives me nuts.
