Less Worse Can Be Good Enough

Matt Harvey? Not fixed.

If anything, Harvey looked worse than he did in Cleveland. The velocity was up a little, perhaps, but still not where it needs to be, and the pitches were up a lot. Harvey staggered through five innings, bailed out by Yoenis Cespedes‘s insane throw to the plate and a bit of luck. With a little less luck, Jace Peterson blasts the floater of a breaking ball that was Harvey’s last pitch of the fourth inning for a game-tying pinch-hit three-run homer; Cespedes’s throw was a mighty and marvelous thing, but I cringed to see Travis d’Arnaud‘s mitt on the wrong side of an onrushing Nick Markakis. D’Arnaud held on and didn’t get hurt, two things that haven’t always been true. Happily, Harvey was out of the inning; mercifully, he was out of the game.

I shouldn’t be too apocalyptic: pitching’s really difficult, and making progress on mechanical adjustments isn’t like throwing a switch. Harvey had some stretches where his pitches were down in the zone and had bite. Maybe he’ll have more stretches like that, gain back a few ticks on the fastball with more work, and start missing bats again. Or maybe — and honestly, this seems like the more likely outcome — something’s physically wrong, and the Mets will get Harvey to admit it so they can work on getting it put right.

The Mets won in part because Curtis Granderson was awesome and Cespy made that glorious throw. But they also won because the Braves are crummy, to use a technical term. This is an undermanned ball club enduring the barren part of a rebuild before they decamp to suburbia and get reinforcements from the minors. Bud Norris is a tomato-can hurler there to eat innings, mark time and hopefully teach the young guys something along the way — an unfortunate, sometimes admirable role recently played for our side by the likes of Tim Redding and Livan Hernandez. Norris’s outing actually was a lot like Harvey’s — his breaking stuff was lacking and his pitches were elevated — but Norris isn’t as good as even a diminished Harvey, the hitters supporting him aren’t as good as the Mets’, and he made bad pitches at bad times, scoreboardly speaking.

Still, the Mets won. And hey, Harvey’s endured an entire career worth of ulcerous 2-1 and 3-2 losses and so deserved a 5-and-fly victory. Watch baseball for even a few weeks and you’ll understand that unfairness is part of its fabric. Ask Michael Conforto, who began his night with a single and then spent the rest of it working good counts, pulverizing baseballs … and watching them sizzle into Atlanta gloves. Each time, Conforto trudged back to the dugout looking alternately amused and affronted.

Sometimes you do everything right and go 1 for 5. Or you stagger through 101 so-so pitches and walk off the winner. Baseball, man.