Jon Niese [1] has a suspect shoulder that demands periodic trips to the 15-day DL, and a mental approach to his craft that calls for the 80-year DL. He begins a game with a plan, and was born with the talent to execute it. But he’s incapable of adjusting if anything goes wrong, whether it’s his location or which pitches are working or his defense or the umpiring or bad luck or his horoscope or the U.S. dollar/Burundian franc exchange rate or whatever else doesn’t go exactly the way he thought it would go while he was in the consequence-free cradle of the bullpen.
Everybody has a plan until they get punched, to quote Mike Tyson [2] (no, Baseball Reference, not that one) and Niese has a glass jaw.
But that’s not the real problem with Jon Niese.
(Nor is it that I detest him, though that’s also true [3].)
The real problem is that Niese is no longer better than the Mets’ other options for the starting rotation. Noah Syndergaard [4] is ready for the big leagues — which doesn’t mean that he’ll dominate, just that he has nothing left to learn in Las Vegas. And Steven Matz [5] is very close to that same status.
Last year this didn’t matter, because Syndergaard and Matz were part of the future. Now they’re part of the present, and the only way to discover what they’ll become is by watching them challenge big-league hitters and be challenged by them.
Niese’s days of becoming something, on the other hand, are over. He arrived in the big leagues seven years ago, and is one of four Mets with tenures that reach back to Shea Stadium. (Your others: David Wright [6], Daniel Murphy [7] and Bobby Parnell [8].) We know Niese’s strengths, and oh boy do we know his weaknesses. He is what he is — a No. 4 starter who might have been more if not for injuries and his own limitations. That’s not news. What is news is that now he’s in a rotation with a bunch of potential No. 1s and No. 2s, and very soon there won’t be enough spots for everybody.
So trade Niese, right [9]? Great idea, but who’d take him? Other teams see the injury history, the suspect mechanics and the dreadful body language on the mound. They hear the muttered postgame alibis and Terry Collins [10]‘ barely suppressed frustration. (His comments tonight about Niese not using all his pitches were telling — as was Collins’ bafflement about what happened in Chicago.)
At the end of 2012 the prospect of having Niese under contract through 2016 [11] (with two more years of club options) seemed like a bargain, but the Mets needed him then. Now that he’s in the way and the Mets don’t need him, the prospect of two more years of Niese is a gamble. The Mets are left hoping for a sucker at the table. Good luck with that.
* * *
Since we must, let’s talk about the game inflicted on us tonight. I seized a chance to catch up with an old friend and so saw the first two-thirds in snatches on a bar TV. Wait, Lagares didn’t catch that? Why is no one covering first? How many runs is that in this inning? What are the Nats doing? They’re playing them, really? Who the hell do I root for, plague?
When I got home I asked Emily if Niese had been unlucky or terrible. Her reply was that he’d been a little unlucky and then a lot terrible, which is too often the only Jon Niese scouting report you need. Beyond that, well, Murph had a quintessential Murph game, hitting a home run into the outermost precincts of Utleyville that delighted him and us, and then unaccountably abandoning his post on a bunt play that second basemen need to execute in their sleep. (Actually, narcolepsy would be a plausible explanation for some of Murph’s Murphiest moments.)
Oh, and Darrell Ceciliani [12] — Met No. 996 if you’re scoring at home, which I hope the Mets are — got his first big-league hit. Soon after that, he got his first experience of ending a game by striking out. That kind of night. Really, the best thing about this one was that it ended [13].