Harvey shining brightest
We were reminded on Thursday afternoon in Washington, as we if we needed reminding, what we missed when the Mets lost Matt Harvey for more than a season and so did baseball. We saw at the same time that he is the ace of the city and the biggest baseball star of the city, famous because of his surgically repaired right arm and his fastball and the breaking balls he drops on hitters as a different way of dropping a hammer on them.
So Harvey was the big story in town this past week, the way he will be this week, when he returns to Citi Field and pitches there for the first time since the summer of 2013 when something snapped inside his right elbow. That start will be an event and so will all the others he makes if his arm holds up, and there is no reason off what we have seen in the baseball spring to think that arm won’t hold up. You are either this kind of star or you’re not. Harvey is.
The Yankees? Here is all you need to know about the Yankees and their own opening week to the baseball season: The big story for them was Alex Rodriguez, a soon-to-be-40 hitter who also missed last season, just for far different reasons than Matt Harvey did.
The guy Yankee fans are talking about after the first week of the season is a guy the people who run their team didn’t even want batting third by the fourth game.
This doesn’t mean that the Mets are going to be better than the Yankees, or that Harvey’s brilliance will be enough to carry his team through the summer. It doesn’t mean that Harvey really will turn out to be their Seaver, at least in the short run, and carry the Mets back to October for the first time since 2006, when they were as close as they were to not just making the World Series, but probably winning it that year.
But from the time he made his first spring training start, when he nearly threw the ball 100 miles an hour in those first two innings, it is Harvey who has been the player to talk about in town, Harvey who has been the player to watch. And when he was asked to show up in his first official start since 2013, he threw 91 pitches and struck out nine guys and gave up just one walk and shut out the Nationals and beat Stephen Strasburg.
“It couldn’t have gone much better,” Harvey said when it was over. No, it could not. Now he comes back to the city this week, back to Citi Field, where the kid started the All-Star Game in ‘13 before he got hurt. A friend of mine, a Mets fans, asked the other day if I would trade the Mets’ starting rotation for Washington’s, which starts with Max Scherzer and is deep and talented and is supposed to take the Nationals all the way to the World Series this year. I said I would not. Because the Mets have Matt Harvey and, even with Strasburg, the Nationals do not.
We have already seen with Harvey how much serendipity is involved in a pitcher’s career, the same as we are seeing it with Masahiro Tanaka, who was the star of the New York season in 2014 before he tore a ligament in his own pitching elbow. And yet: On Thursday in Washington, it was as if Harvey had never been away. He pitched as well as he did before he got hurt. If you are a Mets fan, you wouldn’t trade Harvey right now, at 26, for anybody, not Kershaw or Bumgarner or King Felix or anybody.
He is that kind of show. The Yankees, with the Red Sox in town, were a different kind of show on Friday night and into Saturday morning, playing 19 innings against the Red Sox, fighting back in the bottom of the ninth, and the bottom of the 16th, and the bottom of the 18th to tie the game three different times. They did not just show you a lot of fight in that game, they showed you a lot of arm. And their most important arm, Tanaka’s, will be on display on Sunday night.
But as many strong arms as Brian Cashman has tried to stockpile for this season, as he has tried to make the Yankee pitching staff younger and bigger, you still look at the middle of their order and see Rodriguez and Carlos Beltran, who is 38 next week, and Mark Teixeira, who turned 35 in extra innings as Friday night became Saturday morning, but plays as old as any of them these days.
The only player in the Yankees’ regular starting lineup who is under the age of 30 is Didi Gregorius, the new shortstop. Brian McCann is 31, Chase Headley is about to turn 31, Jacoby Ellsbury is 31, so is Brett Gardner. Stephen Drew, whom the Yankees insist on playing at second base, is 31. This is not an Evil Empire any longer, just an aging one, at least in the everyday lineup.
It doesn’t mean they can’t compete in the AL East. But they better win it if they want to start making the playoffs again, because you have to believe that at least one wild card will come out of the AL Central again, and maybe two. They better be better than the Red Sox, who are never afraid to tear the thing down and start all over again, because now they have done it twice in the last five years. “The Yankees might be like this for a while,” one National League general manager said last season. We will see about that this season, one only a week old. But there is a lot about the Yankees that looks and feels old. Matt Harvey does not. He goes again Tuesday night.