SANDY PITCHES
Says arm expectations
About 20 minutes before first pitch on Monday night, Noah Syndergaard and Matt Harvey popped out of the visitors dugout at Yankees Stadium and walked together out to the visitors bullpen. There, they joined Jacob deGrom, Steven Matz and Zack Wheeler. The Mets’ dream rotation, the one that everyone was saying could rival any in history for the best in baseball, was together.
As is the routine, all the starters gathered in the bullpen to watch that night’s starter warm up. Monday they watched Rafael Montero get ready for what may have been one of the few big starts left in the Mets season, the Subway Series opener against the Yankees. Montero was solid but the Yankees won, 4-2, after blasting three solo homers.
For the second year in a row, the Mets season was derailed by injuries to the pitchers. Harvey, who threw a bullpen session Monday and is expected to make a second rehab start on Wednesday, should be back by the end of the season after dealing with weakness in his shoulder resulting from surgery last year. Syndergaard, who tore his right lat muscle, will make his first pitches off a mound in over three months on Tuesday at that same bullpen.
Wheeler is just beginning to throw again after being shut down with a stress reaction in his right arm. Matz has struggled to regain his mechanics after missing the first two months of the season because of elbow discomfort.
DeGrom, who makes the start Tuesday night against the Yankees, has been the sole positive pitching story for the Mets this season.
Once the rockstar rotation of the future, it is looking more like the rotation that may never be. And that has to have the Mets rethinking their approach to the rebuild. They can’t go into 2018 expecting pitchers to be the foundation for the future as they have the last five years.
“I was one of the people who was completely wrong. I was proven wrong. I thought this group would pump out start after start quality pitching,” SNY analyst and former Mets pitcher Ron Darling said. “It didn’t work out, I was as wrong as anybody else. I would be more judicious as I judged my team going into next season. Maybe I don’t have an A+ staff, maybe it’s a B+ or an A- staff, whatever, that way they build around some better offense, better defense.
“The pitching and the defense, it’s hard to say how closely it’s related, but I do have to say the defense dropped the ball in the early part of the season,” Darling said. “But that’s going to have to be different when you