The Mets won a game today [1], and in case you had any doubt, winning most definitely feels better than losing.
So how’d they win? By the skin of their teeth, actually. They got their usual terrific starting pitching, with Jacob deGrom [2] throttling the Brewers. They got just enough hitting — TWO WHOLE RUNS, MA! And they didn’t screw up defensively.
(Though they tried. DeGrom spoke for every Mets fan on Earth when he turned away from Darrell Ceciliani [3] and Michael Cuddyer [4] having narrowly missed a collision that would have George Theodore [5]‘d them both and probably ensured a defeat.)
By the midpoint of the game, however, the buzz was all about what’s happening next: The Mets are calling up Steven Matz [6], apparently to start Sunday.
The six-man rotation is back, and won’t have to stick around too long to have had a longer tenure than the last six-man rotation. After the game, Terry Collins [7] simply muttered that there’d be an announcement on Friday, which seemed unnecessarily mysterious. Perhaps he was told to leave the talking to Sandy Alderson. Perhaps there’s a trade in the works. Perhaps Jeff Wilpon wants to anoint Matz with oil and spices. Who the hell even knows with this bunch?
I’ll be glad to see Matz, though unfortunately he’s unlikely to be the answer at any of the other positions where the Mets are plagued by uncertainty, which right now would be seven of the eight. The one thing the Mets don’t particularly need right now is more starting pitching, not that that’s any reason to keep a kid in the minors who doesn’t seem to have a lot left to learn.
Given what happened to poor Dillon Gee [8] last time there seemed to be more starters than slots, I’m not going to get too worked up about any of this. (Gee, by the way, got pounded for Las Vegas tonight.) It’ll be fun to welcome Matz to the big club, and record him in The Holy Books as (presumably) the 999th Met in franchise history.
And then we’ll see. Maybe he’ll be Jerry Koosman [9] and maybe he’ll be Tim Leary [10]. Nobody really knows, which is where both the anxiety and the fun come from.
What I do know is this: Matz is the last of a very exciting crop of heralded young pitchers to arrive. That group started with Jenrry Mejia [11], with Matt Harvey [12], Jeurys Familia [13], Zack Wheeler [14], Rafael Montero [15] and Noah Syndergaard [16] following one after the other, like they were rolling off a pitcher assembly line. (I don’t count deGrom, not to slight him but because absolutely nobody saw him coming.) None of the young pitchers has been a true washout; all have shown at least flashes of the potential that led fans to demand they be sprung from the minors and could still be impact players, either in relief or as starters.
The Mets have other good young pitchers in the system, but Matz will be the last from this era. Once he arrives, our hope — and our impatience — will focus on the system’s hitters. Dilson Herrera [17]‘s the vanguard, arriving early and quite possibly headed back down for more seasoning. Brandon Nimmo [18] and Michael Conforto [19] are the big bats we’d like to see (and that some are already agitating for); perhaps they’ll head a hitting class that includes Gavin Cecchini [20], Amed Rosario [21], Dom Smith and Jhoan Urena [22].
And perhaps they won’t. A pessimist would predict that the hitters from that group who do prosper in the big leagues will start arriving as the Mets have to start to sell off their young hurlers, leading to a ridiculous see-saw era of solid Mets offense and terrible pitching.
But that’s for future agonized blog posts. The Mets won. We deserve a rest from pessimism. The Mets won and Steven Matz is coming. Let’s enjoy both those things.