Longtime Cardinal pitching coach Dave Duncan loves the sinker. The Braves’ Leo Mazzone was all about establishing the pitch low and away. Rick Peterson may hate the cutter.

The Mets’ Dan Warthen may not have the name value of legendary pitching coaches that have come before him, but he does have his own pitch. If you want to see what it looks like, you just have to notice how the Mets, as a team, are outliers when it comes to slider velocity and movement.

The Mets are throwing a different kind of slider.

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The Mets have an embarrassment of riches in their starting rotation. Jacob deGrom has seemingly become one of the best pitchers in baseball, and Matt Harvey has pitched very well in his first half-season since returning from injury. Behind them, Noah Syndergaard has shown flashes of dominance over his first eight starts in the majors, while Bartolo Colon and Jon Niese have pitched admirably at the back of the rotation. To accommodate all of these arms, the Mets outrighted Dillon Gee — a pitcher who appears to be a serviceable starting pitcher — to the minors last week.

Yet, despite of all of the talent in their rotation, the Mets are adding yet another intriguing arm to the mix. Word broke yesterday that New York is summoning lefty Steven Matz to the majors. He will make his big-league debut on Sunday against the Cincinnati Reds. The Mets will presumably employ a six-man rotation for the time being. Kiley McDaniel ranked Matz 65th on his preseason top-200 list.

Matz certainly did enough in the minors this year to warrant a call-up. In fact, if it weren’t for the current log jam at the big-league level, he likely would have gotten the nod a bit sooner. Matz pitched to a 2.19 ERA and 3.43 FIP in his 90 innings in Triple-A Las Vegas. He struck out an impressive 26% of opponent batters faced, while walking a reasonable 9%.

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Among the many complains of Mets fans at the moment is that the defense hasn’t been doing enough to support a pitching staff that carries the burden of trying to do everything. It stands to reason, if you’re going to be built first and foremost around run prevention, you’d want to do as much as you can to, say, prevent runs. It’s not a total surprise the Mets have had some defensive issues; they’ve had Wilmer Flores at shortstop, after all, and Michael Cuddyer in an outfield corner. More of a shock is what’s been taking place in the outfield middle. Juan Lagares has been playing defense like a normal and mortal person.

Which a team can’t afford, when said player has Juan Lagares’ bat. The Mets wouldn’t have signed Lagares to a five-year contract if they didn’t believe in him. They were clearly comfortable with the idea of a starting center fielder who does most of his helping on defense. But Lagares, right now, would be evidence to the contrary of the idea that defense doesn’t slump. How much of this seems like a real thing, and how much seems like just a few bad breaks?

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The Mets have lost seven games in a row. It’s never a good time to lose seven games in a row, but a particularly bad time is when the rival Nationals decide to win five games in a row. So it is that the Mets have ceded control of the National League East, falling perilously close to the surprisingly competent Braves. Now, if you just fast-forwarded from the start of the season to now, these standings wouldn’t be a surprise. The Nationals were supposed to run away with the division. The Mets were supposed to be okay, and the Phillies were supposed to suck. Outside of the Marlins, it seems mostly normal. But sequences of events matter, and the way the year has gone for the Mets makes this current situation feel desperate. A season feels like it’s slipping out of their grasp.

There’s an awful lot of pressure on Sandy Alderson to make a move. Alderson feels it, and he’s been in communication with other front offices. Here’s one move, that just showed up literally as I was writing the above paragraph:

Source says #Mets calling up Matz. Two different club officials declined comment when asked. Team again could be pondering six-man rotation.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) June 25, 2015

This has been coming. Fans knew Steven Matz was on the way. But, consider the first tweet response to that:

Young Ideas ?@DickYoungsGhost 23m23 minutes ago

@Ken_Rosenthal Unless Matz can bat .400 and play all other positions, still doesn’t help the @Mets.

During the losing streak, the Mets have scored nine runs in seven games. They’ve had a bottom-five NL offense for the year, and a bottom-five NL offense the last month or so. Pressure isn’t on to make any move — pressure is on to make an offensively-minded move. It’s understandable, given how the Mets have looked. But it might very well be prudent for Alderson to keep on taking the boring approach.

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The Mets have, theoretically, too many starting pitchers. With top prospect Noah Syndergaard forcing his way into the rotation, the team experimented with a six-man rotation for a week, but has now reverted back to the standard five-man grouping, with Dillon Gee heading to the bullpen as a result. Gee is not particularly happy with this arrangement, and voiced his displeasure with the situation over the weekend.

“I’m almost at the point now where I just don’t even care anymore,” Gee said. “I mean, I’m kind of just over it all. I’ll do the best I can out of the pen now.”

…

Later, Gee was asked if he would have preferred being traded. “I mean, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a G.M., so I don’t know. I mean — I don’t know. I’m done trying to figure out this whole situation.”

But even with Gee demoted to the bullpen, the Mets still have too many pitchers. Beyond their three young studs in Matt Harvey, Jacob DeGrom, and the aforementioned Syndergaard, they also have Bartolo Colon and Jon Niese, both of whom are inoffensive back-end innings-eaters. With the first three guys locked in on talent and the latter two unlikely to get dumped for payroll reasons — Colon makes $11 million this year, while Niese is making $7 million and is due another $9 million next year — the Mets rotation remains full, even without considering pitching prospect Steven Matz, who is excelling down in Triple-A. Matz’s performances are forcing the team to consider promoting him sooner than later, even if they don’t have an obvious opening for him at the moment.

But despite the fact that there isn’t really a job opening for a starting pitcher in Queens, it’s become increasingly popular to suggest that the Mets are playing the Super Two game, holding Matz down to prevent him from reaching arbitration a year earlier, and keeping his future earnings down in the process. Joel Sherman, in this morning’s New York Post:

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On Wednesday, Noah Syndergaard had a day he is likely to hold onto for quite some time. The 22-year-old Mets rookie pitched into the eighth inning, struck out six players, didn’t walk a single batter, allow an extra base hit, or allow a single run to cross the plate while he was on the mound. It was an impressive outing, and Syndergaard’s first four starts have gone well, also. To wit: the right-hander has averaged just over six innings per outing with 22 strikeouts against five walks, and is currently sporting a 2.55 ERA and equally impressive 2.60 FIP. Big things are expected of Syndergaard as the Mets try to make the most out of potential contention this year while simultaneously limiting the number of innings he pitches to save his arm both for October and also the years to come. Determining how to keep pitchers healthy can be challenging, especially when Syndergaard has outings like he did against the Phillies.

Syndgergaard’s last start against the Phillies was impressive because of fastballs like this:

Curves like this:

The start will be most memorable, however, because of this:
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Over the last six months, Lucas Duda has probably heard a lot about last season’s .180 batting average against left-handers. A quick search reveals more than half a million hits for “Lucas Duda .180” and all the results in the first five pages were relevant. Fortunately for Duda, that unsightly .180 batting average in just 125 plate appearances is not relevant when it comes to evaluating him as a hitter. Duda had an excellent season in 2014 that saw him record 30 home runs and establish himself as one of the better hitters in the league, despite questions persisting about his ability to handle left-handed pitching. With two home runs yesterday off left-handed pitchers, Duda equaled his total from all of 2014 in one day. With four of his five home runs on the season coming off of southpaws complementing his power surge against righties from last season, Duda has helped cement his status as an everyday player and removed the prospect of a platoon from the equation.

After Duda’s poor results against left-handers last season, the New York Mets could have placed Duda in a platoon, benching him against lefties. Duda never had particularly good minor-league numbers against lefties, either, reinforcing the logic of such a move. After the signing of Michael Cuddyer, there was some talk of letting Cuddyer take plate appearances at first base against lefties and making Duda a straight platoon player. After the signing, Duda said all of the right things but maintained confidence that he could still hit lefties. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Turner isn’t Babe Ruth — mostly because only Babe Ruth is Babe Ruth. Of late, however, Turner’s numbers have been Ruthian in nature. Consider: since the beginning of 2014, only two hitters in all of baseball have been better than Turner, pound for pound. Two hitters! All this after the Mets released him. Turns out, he met someone on the 2013 Mets that changed his life.

Someone else’s life changed in 2013. This 35-year-old veteran outfielder with a little bit of power and a little bit of speed and a little bit of defense was coming off a down year and a suspension — circumstances which might otherwise be known as “the end of a career.” But he’d heard something about hitting he’d never heard before, and he’d spent the winter in Mexico putting his new philosophy to work. That year in New York, he was hitting for more power than he’d ever had before, and he was relevant once again. He thought he’d tell a red-headed backup infielder a little of what he’d learned.

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Dillon Gee will miss at least the next couple of weeks with a torn groin, but the Mets aren’t likely to suffer too much in his absence. That’s because they have uber-prospect Noah Syndergaard in the fold, who will step in and replace Gee in the rotation. Syndergaard, 22, will make his major-league debut tonight against the Cubs and figures to hold down a spot in the Mets rotation for the foreseeable future. And if you believe the Steamer projections, Syndergaard might actually provide the Mets with a sizable upgrade over Gee.

Before his call up, Syndergaard was one of the very best pitching prospects in the minors. He placed 19th in our preseason top-200 list and was easily the highest rated prospect on the Mets. Other outlets gave him even higher praise, with Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com and Baseball America ranking him 9th, 10th and 11th, respectively.

Given his stuff, it’s not hard to see why he rated so highly. Syndergaard has a sizzling fastball that sits in the mid-to-high 90’s. He complements it with a curveball and changeup that are both average pitches right now, according to Kiley McDaniel, who anticipates both ticking up to above-average (55) in the near future.

Unsurprisingly, Syndergaard checks all of the boxes statistically, as well. My KATOH system, which considers his 2014 stats, absolutely adored the 6-foot-5 righty heading into the year. His projection of 11.5 WAR through age-28 was the 6th highest of any prospect. He ranked second among pitchers, trailing only Julio Urias.

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It’s an easy-enough list to sort. You go to the leaderboard for pitch types and you select the fastball column. There, at the very top, is Bartolo Colon, the only starter in baseball throwing heaters more than 80% of the time. From there, you get to build the narrative, that Colon is extraordinarily weird. He doesn’t look the part of an athlete. He’s 41 years old, and 42 later this month. His average fastball has dropped into the 80s, approaching his rate of contact allowed. And he throws as many pitches as he has walks issued (one). The overall profile doesn’t make a lot of sense — it doesn’t feel like this kind of pitcher ought to be able to succeed.

And, yeah, Colon is weird. It looked like his career was over until it wasn’t, and other pitchers don’t share his current approach. It’s an unusual strategy with which Colon so routinely manages to get hitters out, but the reality isn’t as simple as him getting by with weak fastball after weak fastball. Reality is — guess what! — more complicated than that. Reality is always more complicated. Maybe especially with the freaks.

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