Just Mets

When Matt Harvey takes the mound, it is widely assumed he’s going to be lights out good, and it will be an automatic win for the Mets.

For the most part, the Mets ace has lived up to that assumption. He entered last night’s game with a 5-0 record this season, and had posted a 14-5 record with an astounding 2.29 ERA in his previous 212 innings (31 starts) since the beginning of the 2013 season.

It’s almost unfair to make such an assumption about Harvey, especially since he’s going to be faced with nights like he had on Friday every so often, during which he was not quite lights out good and produced “merely” a quality start while taking his first loss of the season.

Harvey allowed three runs on six hits with a walk and four strikeouts in six innings on Friday, falling to 5-1 for the year and seeing his ERA rise to 2.72 over his first six starts.

“I needed to put up zeroes and I didn’t do that tonight,” Harvey said last night. “I have to go back to square one and pick up where we left with winning.”

Harvey’s fastball was up in the zone early last night, and he had trouble with the crispness of his curveball and slider early. They were putting some good swings on his fastball for most of the night, which suggests he was having trouble commanding the fastball, but he lacked the electricity and zip he normally has on that pitch. The Phillies only swung and missed at 12 percent of his fastballs, and all six of the hits he allowed came on the four seamer.

“When you are that good, he is going to be the first to tell you he didn’t pitch very well,” Terry Collins said. “But he pitched fine.”

It certainly can be chalked up to one of those nights for Harvey (which is a solid night for most pitchers in this league). It will happen again for him during the course of the season as well.

However, he was pitching on six full days of rest, and even he said he had trouble with the extra time off this week. However, he knows he has a responsibility to adjust to the schedule, as do all of the starting pitchers.

“Dealing with it is something you have to do and I don’t think I did a very good job of that,” Harvey said. “But we’re all excited to go back to a five-day rotation.”

In this particular week, the Mets dealt with two off-days which helped extend the rotation. Harvey didn’t pitch out of turn, but last night was only his third start since April 25 at Yankee Stadium, thanks to the two off-days and the Mets using Rafael Montero in a spot start in Miami on April 28.

And, it was his second straight start in which his stuff was at least somewhat off.

The extension of the rotation is designed to be to his benefit, and to a lesser extent, Jacob deGrom’s benefit too. It’s an organizational attempt to limit Harvey’s innings and pitches thrown so to get him through the entire regular season (and hopefully, the postseason) effectively and healthy. So far, they’ve been able to do that through the first month of the season. However, a consequence of this program could be with the crispness of his pitches and difficulty finding a rhythm during these spaced out starts.

The Mets really cannot afford to risk anything with Harvey by going back to a normal program, but they’re then going to have to find a way to make this process smoother for him if it becomes a problem over time.

Harvey has now allowed six earned runs in 12 innings to the Phillies this season, although he’s 5-1 with a 1.99 ERA in seven starts in his career against Philadelphia.