Despite feeling good and sharp on Tuesday night, Noah Syndergaard endured the worst start of his very young big league career.
The young fireballer allowed seven runs on ten hits only four innings of work, but did strikeout ten batters, joining Padres RHP Andrew Cashner as the only two pitchers since 1900 to fan ten or more batters in a game while allowing ten or more hits in less than five innings pitched (Cashner did it on Monday night).
Still, Syndergaard insists he felt really good during his outing, and attributed a lot of his struggles to bad luck.
“There was not a whole lot of hard contact. They just kind of hit the balls where people weren’t,” Syndergaard said.
It can certainly be argued he hit some bad luck in the second inning when he allowed four runs to come across. Yonder Alonso dunked a double to left to lead things off. Then, he got an off-speed pitch down below the knees to Will Middlebrooks, but he stayed back and managed to drop it into center field for a single. Then, Cory Spangenberg legged out a bunt single to load the bases with nobody out. Then, he allowed a single which deflected off his glove and trickled into the hole on the right side which allowed two runs to come across. facing the number eight hitter Alexi Amarista, he
As Syndergaard said, not a lot of hard contact, and potentially some bad luck. However, Syndergaard could not keep the flood gates from opening.
With one out, he allowed a well-struck triple to Will Venable to score Spangenberg and Amarista.
So, a little bit of bad luck, and a little bit of bad execution. Manager Terry Collins felt the latter was a more appropriate summary of Syndergaard’s performance on Tuesday.
“He didn’t locate the ball like he did before,” Collins said. “As we know at this level, good stuff is great, but you have to put it where you want to.”
There were two areas Syndergaard clearly struggled with on Tuesday: the location of both the two-seamer and his curveball. In the second inning when he got into trouble, he was unable to get his curveball down enough, and it had too much plate which is always a hittable location at this level. But he also lost that crispness with the two-seam fastball, a very new pitch for him which was so effective last week against Philadelphia. The Padres reached base all six times they put the two-seamer in play, suggesting he was not able to place it well on the corners in any particular sequence.
Syndergaard of course didn’t excuse his poor effort due to bad luck.
“I didn’t get the job done. I let the team down. So all I can do is forget about it and go on to my next start,” Syndergaard said.
Stinkers are going to happen. It happened for Matt Harvey in Pittsburgh, Jacob deGrom went through a funk, as did Bartolo Colon. The season is too long and the league is too tough for it not to happen. But part of getting through these starts is being able to adjust in-game, and it’s something Syndergaard will learn to do as he evolves at this level. In the case of yesterday, his two-seamer and curveball began to fail him, but he went to the well too often instead of incorporating his change-up more. There’s no way to know if that might have helped limit the damage, but its a very good and valuable weapon in his arsenal.
“There’s going to be times when you’re going to give up some runs and you have to pitch through it,” Collins said.
Just Mets 