Mets manager Terry Collins second guesses decision to keep Matt Harvey in Game 5
NEW YORK — Matt Harvey raced out of the dugout, skipped over the base path and ascended the mound to the roar of a Citi Field crowd whose chants of his name were a vocal bat symbol summoning their Dark Knight to quell the insurgent Royals’ inevitable rally before it began.
The Mets ace had all of his pitches in his tool belt: heat soaring up in the zone, curves breaking below, sliders darting off bat barrels and change ups tumbling behind schedule. Eight innings, zero runs, nine strikeouts, no indication of fatigue.
Harvey had been humbled in a middling start five days prior but had been so transformed back in Gotham that his catcher said he “looked like a whole different human being,” the ball-capped crusader on whom this franchise has long wanted to rely.
This was the stage Harvey wanted — nay, demanded in the dugout for all the world and cameras to see — even overruling his own manager for the opportunity, who acceded to heart over gut and subjected himself to sleepless nights mulling over the decision.
“I felt so great all game,” Harvey said. “I felt so great in the ninth. I wanted the ball, and I gave it everything I had.”
For all the consternation and speculation about innings limits and pitch counts, six-man rotations and skipped starts, Harvey’s and the Mets’ season came down to a few more pitches and one more inning — 216 in the register and a 217th necessary to stave off World Series elimination for another game.
He batted with Kansas City’s Lorenzo Cain for seven pitches, the last a slider that dipped just below the knees for ball four. “He didn’t seem tired,” Cain would say. “He was still throwing mid-90s.” Harvey’s second pitch to Eric Hosmer was a knee-high fastball drilled to deep left field for a run-scoring double, the tying run moving halfway to home without an out.
Only then, when Harvey had shown his vulnerability, did Collins remove him from the game. “It was my fault,” Collins said. “That’s inexcusable, for me.”
Two groundouts and an errant throw home later, and Harvey’s 24-out brilliance was forever relegated to a Royals history-book footnote explaining who the conquered opponent was and why he was still pitching at such a late inning. Competitive stubbornness prevailed, although it’s usually a sought-after trait.
“Unfortunately I just couldn’t finish what I started,” Harvey said. “I felt normal — the same as I did in the eighth, the same as I did in the first inning.”
Had Collins held firm in his early-hook instinct, the complexion of Harvey’s final outing would be unrequited praise rather than being marred by lip readers deciphering his mid-inning discussion and Zapruder dissections of his ninth-inning mechanics.
The takeaway, instead, should be that the Mets’ highest-profile star answered the bell in its biggest game in half a generation.
Harvey and the Mets had butted heads about how accelerated he would rehab and where he would rehab. They disagreed about how often he would throw and how much he would throw — always Harvey pushing the envelope until, suddenly, his agent insisted on a strict innings cap, the pitcher assented and then reversed course.
Every pitch and quip has been monitored and threshed apart. There was a note of caution even before he threw a pitch in spring training, when Collins half-jokingly told Harvey not to throw 100. Harvey, technically, complied. That first pitch hummed to the plate at 99.9 mph.
And, now, having thrown 216 combined regular and postseason innings, the conversation will shift away from nebulous guidelines and restrictions following the Tommy John surgery Harvey had two years and 10 days ago and onto what Harvey has stated his desire to be: a 230-inning workhorse. Harvey, the Mets hope, will now be the guy who shoulders the extra load for teammates, such as Zack Wheeler, whom you may recall is the fifth über-talented young starter in the organization and undergoing his own Tommy John rehab now.
“I think everybody kind of had enough talk and discussion about that whole ordeal,” Harvey said of innings limits. “I’ll be the last person to ever bring that one up again.”
Starting next season, Harvey will merely be the co- or tri-ace of a staff in the enviable position of having three pitchers jockeying for the distinction of being the No. 1 starter: Harvey, Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard — with rookie Steven Matz and Wheeler potentially vying for the designation down the road.
“They learned one thing: They learned how to get through this,” Collins said. “They learned how to get through a long season. They learned what it's like to play in October, and they're going to be a lot better because of this experience.”
Mets now will have to wait a 30th year for another crack at a championship, but in Harvey they have the pitcher they deserve and the one they’ll need again next year.
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