Matt Harvey's uncharacteristic start may have tipped Mets' plans
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The several-day build-up to the World Series allowed certain story lines to build up and be bandied about in every headline, sound bite, think piece and blog post.
The New York Mets starters throw hard. The Kansas City Royals hitters can handle heat. Power pitching versus an aggressive lineup.
Even with all the hype, the first pitch Mets righthander Matt Harvey threw in the World Series unfolded exactly as foreseen — until the end result.
It was a 95-mile-per-hour fastball, the benchmark speed cited all weekend. Royals shortstop Alcides Escobar swung. He made contact.
The script deviated at this juncture, as center fielder Yoenis Cespedes couldn’t quite track down the ball, resulting in Escobar rounding the bases for an inside-the-park home run and conjuring the names Mule Haas and Patsy Dougherty as early-last-century footnotes.
“If that’s your main pitch, that’s what you’re throwing him,” Mets manager Terry Collins had said this weekend. “But what you’ve got to do is make good pitches with it. We’re not going to change the way we go about things. We’ve got to pitch to our strengths, and our strength is power.”
Harvey largely settled down in innings two through five, retiring 11 straight at one point, before Kansas City scratched him for two more runs in the sixth on a series of hits aided by a walk and a sacrifice fly. He’d bequeath the game to the bullpen for what turned out to be an additional eight innings in the Mets’ 4-3 loss to the Royals in World Series Game 1.
Harvey walked two in the first two innings but no more after that. He allowed five hits, with three of them coming in the sixth. After that inning, Harvey told Collins he felt fine but was removed anyway after six in what became a very bullpen-taxing 14-inning Mets loss.
“There’s a lot disappointment in giving up those runs,” Harvey said. “In my mind, if I wouldn’t have done that, obviously the game wouldn’t have dragged on as long as it did.”
“I thought when we started the game he wasn't real sharp,” Collins said. “His command was off a little bit. I thought he got a little bit better groove. As we've seen, he had to work so hard to get out of the first couple of innings that late in the game his ball started coming up, and that's when I thought he was done.”
The end result was the bare minimum quality start — six innings, three runs — and Harvey’s uncharacteristically brief 80-pitch outing may have tipped both clubs’ game plans, with New York’s next two starters, Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard, featuring similar repertoires as Harvey.
The Royals were their usual swing-early, swing-often selves, offering at 39 of 80 pitches and making contact on all but seven times, an 18% rate one tick less than their season-long 19% standard. Harvey only had two strikeouts, matching a career low from a June 10 start against the Giants in which he gave up seven runs in six innings.
“The scouting report doesn’t lie,” Harvey said of their swing-happy ways. “It’s what they’re good at.”
“They’re obviously an ultra-aggressive team, and you saw that today,” said starter-turned-reliever Jon Niese. “We have to use that to our advantage and figure out ways to get them out early and get them out often.”
For Harvey, however, the game was a big departure from both his 26% swing-and-miss rate and his heavy fastball reliance. He threw heaters for 61% of all regular season pitches but only 39% in Game 1; even though the pitch averaged 95.6 and maxed out at 97.3, which were within 1 mph of his norms, he reduced his fastball usage — perhaps by design, perhaps in adjustment to what was working — against the Royals’ velocity-loving offense, which led the majors with a .284 average against pitches 95 and up.
“I didn’t feel all that great, so I had to mix things up,” Harvey said. “Obviously from the first pitch on, I knew I had to mix things in and try to keep them off balance. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to do that in the sixth inning. For a good stretch there, I was getting some quick outs but unfortunately I wasn’t able to hold the lead.”
Instead, Harvey’s secondary became his primary. Such a drastic alteration to his usual game plan—hardly not changing things, as Collins insisted—suggests that this was about more than him not feeling good.
He threw 20 changeups, 16 sliders and 13 curves, and in K.C.’s two-run sixth-inning, the Royals weren’t just hitting the heat. Although Ben Zobrist started the rally by doubling on a fastball, the other key plays — Lorenzo Cain’s single, Eric Hosmer’s sacrifice fly, Mike Moustakas’ single — were all struck on off-speed pitches. By the time Moustakas roped his run-scoring hit into centerfield, he had already seen seven secondary pitches from Harvey over two plate appearances; he singled on a change up.
“It was a day where he had better command of his off speed stuff,” New York catcher Travis d’Arnaud said, “so we tried to utilize that today.”
Both deGrom and Syndergaard had nearly identical fastball usage rates this season — 60%, give or take — so it’ll be interesting to see if they follow Harvey’s lead against a Royals lineup that makes no qualms about its swing-at-every-strike approach.
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