Matt Harvey’s off-field issues not what should concern Mets fans
Let’s spend the next 700 or so words outside of Matt Harvey’s head. Let’s make a pact to keep the names of party girls and Patriots out of the next 18 paragraphs, to refrain from speculating on the whys and wherefores of Harvey’s Lost Weekend and all that may or may not have pushed him there.
That’s important business, but it’s his business.
So let’s focus on his right arm, which for better or worse, whether Harvey or Scott Boras or anyone else likes it, really is every bit of the public trust that baseball itself is. That’s the essential part of Harvey’s body and his makeup that’s accessible to everyone else, that Mets fans have a fundamental interest in and that he ultimately will have to answer to and for.
This is what the man who will catch him Friday night in Milwaukee, Rene Rivera, had to say about that the other day: “I think he will be fine. He’s a grown man. I believe he can step in and forget about the situation and perform. That is what we are looking for.”
And then: “He’s going to be an elite pitcher again, but it’s going to take some time.”
It’s why pitching can be the most mysterious and inexplicable skill in all of sports. Kids with 100-mph fastballs routinely get battered and bloodied by big-league hitters; most of the balls Greg Maddux threw in a 23-year career would barely crack a pane of glass, let alone break it, and yet he won 355 games.
How crazy is pitching to describe? Think of the word all pitchers use to illustrate what they do: stuff. Honestly: What the heck does that mean, anyway? “Stuff”? It’s a catch-all phrase to try to explain the inexplicable, to lend words to the indefinable.
There’s so much science involved in baseball now, so much math, so much analysis. Yet the most advanced praise a pitcher can earn is this: He has great stuff.
Matt Harvey, once upon a time, threw epic stuff. He threw 98 mph (and still does; he had a pitch in his last outing in Atlanta that was measured by Brooks Baseball at 98.63 mph), and he threw it to regions of the strike zone that paralyzed hitters. Paired with a hard slider and an almost-unfair changeup, he was practically unhittable in 2013. And he was pretty damned close to that, post-Tommy John, in 2015.
“His stuff,” Terry Collins said, in one particularly hyperbolic moment in 2013, “makes grown men cry.”
The two men in Mets history Harvey most often is compared to are Tom Seaver and Dwight Gooden, two other hard-throwing icons of two other baseball generations who had to overcome mid-career interruptions and had to answer to new realities afterward. To mixed results.
In 1974, after seven years during which he averaged 276 innings, Seaver went 11-11 with a bloated (for him) 3.20 ERA and suffered a debilitating case of sciatica, which threatened the very engines that fueled him — his back and his legs. Yet in ’75, he won his third Cy Young Award (22-9. 2.38, 243 strikeouts in 280 innings), and post-sciatica, he collected 165 of his 311 career wins.
“Everyone always looked at Seaver as a pure power pitcher,” his running mate, Jerry Koosman, said a few years ago. “But what made him a Hall of Famer was his stuff.”
Gooden’s problems were both internal and external. He was 58-19 with a 2.29 ERA before his 22nd birthday. He missed the first 2½ months of the ’87 season while undergoing cocaine rehab; from that moment on, there was only one more year in which he pitched to a sub-3.00 ERA — 1989, when he also suffered his only major arm injury, a partially torn rotator cuff.
“Dwight still threw hard enough,” his teammate, Ron Darling, said before a 1986 team reunion not long ago. “But his stuff was just a little off.”
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It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in pitching to realize Harvey’s stuff has been absent for two years. His last two starts, it has been particularly invisible, the brutal Braves pounding him for 13 hits and 12 earned runs in 9 ²/₃ innings.
If the Mets really were shielding Harvey from whatever scorn a thin weekday gathering at Citi Field might have thrown his way Wednesday, they really did him no favors with Friday’s assignment; the Brewers’ everyday players had a .805 OPS heading into Thursday’s games, compared with the Giants’ .643.
Maybe that would have mattered. Maybe not.
Stuff happens, after all.
And stuff also goes away, sometimes mysteriously.
Sometimes forever.