The Adjustment Noah Syndergaard Made

The first pitch Noah Syndergaard threw Friday night sent Alcides Escobar to the ground. Syndergaard didn’t give Escobar an opportunity to swing because the instinctive priority was for him to get his head out of the way, and Syndergaard didn’t bother trying to disguise his intent after the game. He owned up to it — he wanted to give the Royals a little fright. The Royals, in turn, were furious, as they’re allowed to be, but the rest of the game spun the narrative wheel, and it ultimately settled on “Syndergaard delivered a message.” In the end he pitched pretty well and the Mets emerged victorious, so Syndergaard gets the favorable press.

But for whatever it’s worth, if Syndergaard did succeed in intimidating his opponent, it didn’t look that way early on, when the brushback was most fresh. After Escobar got knocked down, the Royals scored a run in the first. They scored another two in the second. The immediate aftermath, for Syndergaard, was troublesome, and the national broadcast speculated that he’d only succeeded in waking the Royals up. It was only after Syndergaard turned his game around that the conversation grew more sunny. And as a part of that process, Syndergaard and Travis d’Arnaud made a change on the fly.

To be clear, in the early going, Syndergaard wasn’t exactly getting battered. One of the two hits in the first inning was an infield single. In the second, Salvador Perez led off and singled with a broken bat. The ball wasn’t flying, but it was going to places Syndergaard didn’t like, which is the most important thing. Like a lot of pitchers, and especially pitchers with heat like Syndergaard, he came out and attempted to establish the fastball, but it wasn’t going like he wanted. In the first two innings, nine Royals at-bats ended with fastballs. Six of those also ended with hits. Maybe there would’ve been more than three runs had Alex Gordon not gotten thrown out at third base. Syndergaard was in a bad way.

He got out of it. He lasted six innings. The Royals wouldn’t score again. The Mets offense finally came alive, and the way this felt toward the end, the Mets successfully pulled off a comfortable playoff win against Kansas City. It can happen, even if it was only comfortable for the final three frames.

Frequently, talk about in-game pitcher adjustments can be nonsense. What happens a lot of the time is that pitchers just pitch like pitchers, and sometimes that goes their way, and sometimes it doesn’t. So you don’t want to go in assuming something changed, and when Syndergaard spoke with Ken Rosenthal, he just said he did something minor and mechanical. Syndergaard didn’t provide an easy answer, but there was a little more than he let on.

Consider the first pitch of the third inning:

That’s nothing too special — that’s a first-pitch ball. Pitchers like to avoid first-pitch balls. But that’s also a slider. It was the first slider Syndergaard threw in the game. He would throw 15 more, breaking the pitch out the second and third times through the lineup. Over two innings and 39 pitches, Syndergaard’s slider rate was 0%. Over the last four innings and 65 pitches, Syndergaard’s slider rate was 25%. Right out of the gate, it looked like Syndergaard wanted to make the Royals afraid of his fastball. He started having success only when he put the fastball away.

By which I mean, over those four innings, fewer than half of Syndergaard’s pitches were heaters. The fastball itself was fine, and the velocity was there, but as we’ve all discussed several times over, the Royals are a fastball-hitting team, and Syndergaard has other weapons. Over two innings, Syndergaard threw more than 70% of his pitches over the plate, and he put almost 60% of his pitches in the zone. After that, he threw about 60% of his pitches over the plate, and just shy of 40% of his pitches in the zone. Syndergaard was looking to use the Royals’ aggressiveness against them. This might be an example, but this might also just have been a perfect situational pitch:

For a visual idea of how Syndergaard pitched, here are locations, broken down by time in the game. The first two innings, he was around the hitting zone:

Then came the expansion:

You see more offspeed stuff down. You see more offspeed stuff thrown to Syndergaard’s glove-side. A lot of those are sliders. He was locating that pitch well, which is why he started using it so much. And the Royals just couldn’t make any quality contact. Their timing was disrupted, and Syndergaard was pitching to different areas.

In the sixth inning, Syndergaard did find himself in a jam. The slider helped him strike out Lorenzo Cain, and then he used it to strike out Eric Hosmer in a full count. But Mike Moustakas hit a fastball for an infield single, and then Salvador Perez walked on five pitches. Alex Gordon came up to a full count, and he laid off a slider similar to the one that had put Hosmer away. So the bases were loaded for Alex Rios, and the score was 5-3. Terry Collins left his pitcher in there, for what would be the biggest at-bat of his life.

When Rios first batted, he turned on a first-pitch fastball. The second time, he saw two curveballs down, two fastballs up, and one slider up. This time, Syndergaard threw a perfectly-located first-pitch slider down and away for a called strike. Then he went right back to the well and threw what was more or less an identical pitch.

Something could’ve gone wrong, sure. Rios could’ve beat that out. Maybe the ball could’ve been bobbled. Contact offense, and everything. The Royals were trying to make something happen. But Syndergaard executed exactly the pitch he wanted to. He hit the right spot, and the ball left Rios’ bat at 69 miles per hour, on a downward trajectory. Syndergaard had never thrown a bigger pitch, and he protected a lead that was soon to get much bigger.

The story of Syndergaard’s slider is an interesting one. In the middle of this very season, he said he was still fastball/curveball/changeup. The slider was just something he’d play around with. Then the slider started to show up, and Syndergaard featured it in the NLDS against the Dodgers. Yet the last time out, against the Cubs, Syndergaard threw the slider all of twice. It didn’t mean anything to him. And then Friday, it didn’t show up for two innings. You could forgive the Royals for maybe being caught a little off guard. But Syndergaard folded that weapon in, and he believed in it so much he used it twice in a row in the most stressful pitching situation he’s ever experienced. He threw the slider on the first pitch, and he threw the slider on the second pitch, and both of the sliders were perfect. Syndergaard escaped that jam — in the World Series — with a pitch he didn’t throw in spring training.

A game so bad became a game so wonderful, for Syndergaard and for the rest of the Mets. Because of Syndergaard, the Mets offense had a chance to deliver a win. And because of the Mets offense, now we have a series. It never really counts until both teams are on the board.