If Anybody Had a Start

I don’t know if it’s a repressed memory that suddenly burst through my consciousness or simply a detail that didn’t hold my attention for long when it was fresh, but after the Mets’ losing streak reached six games Thursday night in Atlanta, I thought of the 2024 National League Championship Series, specifically the Mets’ starting pitching in those six games against the Dodgers and how we hardly had any.

Game One: Kodai Senga 1.1 IP
Game Two: Sean Manaea 5 IP
Game Three: Luis Severino 4.2 IP
Game Four: Jose Quintana 3.1 IP
Game Five: David Peterson 3.2 IP
Game Six: Sean Manaea 2 IP

Not one quality start, only one quantity start, each game a puzzle to be put together with tired, unreliable pieces. The bullpen was stressed. The starters were gassed. If the Mets didn’t hit, the Mets couldn’t stay close, which the Mets didn’t in any of their four losses. I had more or less put how the Mets lost the NLCS out of my mind in the aftermath of the 2024 postseason because everything about the Mets getting to and succeeding in the 2024 postseason prior to the NLCS was so rewarding. I was depressed for maybe two days that we’d come within two games of the World Series, and concerned that a chance like that doesn’t necessarily come around very often, but then I shrugged that the Dodgers were the Dodgers, and was back to being happy that so much happened rather than being sad that something was over. Soon, it was the offseason, and we were gearing up for the year to come, which looked promising before it began, and began delivering on its promise soon after it began.

But now our starting pitching is in 2024 NLCS mode, which is to say we are letting our shot at a pennant slip away.

Six games don’t give a team much space to work through the kind of pitching woes that befell the Mets at the wrong time last October. Eighty-seven games, which is how many remain in 2025, provide a vastly wider berth to fix what appears broken. Thus, the way things are currently going can be turned around. Yet the way things are currently going feels at least temporarily intractable because when it comes to starting pitching, suddenly we hardly have any.

Game One: Clay Holmes 5 IP
Game Two: Tylor Megill 3.2 IP
Game Three: Griffin Canning 4.1 IP
Game Four: David Peterson: 7+ IP
Game Five: Paul Blackburn 3.2 IP
Game Six: Clay Holmes 4.2 IP

You can scratch Megill from an imminent turnaround, as he is on the IL with an elbow sprain. You know Senga isn’t a part of any of this, thanks to a hamstring strain. You’re left leaning on Peterson for an extra couple of batters in an eighth inning when maybe he should have been deemed done for the night. You’re hoping Holmes isn’t bumping up against an organic innings ceiling in his first full year of starting; lord knows the fifth inning Thursday night looked like one too many for him. Canning and Blackburn have reverted to looking like the journeymen they were before the Mets’ pitching brain trust went under the hood and tinkered with their mechanics.

Now you land on a Friday in Philadelphia planning to start Blade Tidwell, returned from the minors, not because he has progressed nicely since his unsuccessful cameo in St. Louis last month, but because you have nobody else to pit against Zack Wheeler. You were going to try your luck with Justin Hagenman for a few innings, but Hagenman was needed Thursday to back up Holmes and Huascar Brazoban — one of the many Yeomen of the Bullpen getting buried by extra work — and is therefore unavailable.

So except for Peterson, knock wood, we have about as much starting pitching to count on in the week ahead as we did the week we faced the Dodgers for all the NL marbles. And nobody in the bullpen feels like a sure thing for a given out or inning, let alone multiple outs and innings. And, oh by the way, nobody’s really hitting, not the big guys who you figure will come around as a unit soon, not the mid-level guys who you figure will respond consistently to the big guys getting on base and driving in runs in front of them, and certainly not the young guys who, neither individually nor collectively, are showing anything at all.

The first-place Mets are still the first-place Mets, except now they share first place, and for the first time all season, I’ve looked at the Wild Card standings with more than vague curiosity to see how the other half lives. At this rate, the other half beckons. Rates change over time. Personnel changes over time. We know there are pitchers coming back soon or soon-ish from injury. We don’t know what they will provide as they ramp up to full speed. We don’t know what full speed will encompass.

We do know time within a season can be long. Eighty-seven games’ worth of time qualifies as long. Though if the next 87 games are a whole lot like the last six games, that’s not comforting.