Just Mets

Noah Syndergaard insisted on Tuesday night he felt as good as he has to this point in the season.

“I felt I had some of the best stuff I’ve had in my entire life,” Syndergaard said after the game.

Unfortunately for him, he ran into a combination of bad luck and a lack of swings and misses on his 98 mph. The result was his fourth loss of the year and four runs and ten hits allowed with only two strikeouts in six innings.

I just couldn’t get a good break going,” Syndergaard explained about his outing on Tuesday. “They just happened to make contact. They had some hard hit balls. I was able to get some ground balls, but they hit them where our infielders weren’t. You can’t do much. You just continue to try to make good pitches and hope things go your way.

“I felt I threw the ball well. The stat line doesn’t show [that],” he said.

It was indeed a strange outing for Syndergaard. There really wasn’t a lot of hard contact against him, and they did bleed some balls through holes which had to have been frustrating. The Giants tortured him with soft contact on pitchers pitches in and off the plate, balls which were just out of the reach of the infielders, and so on.

But the fact they made so much contact and had an inability to put the Giants hitters away was perplexing.

He threw 63 four and two-seam fastballs on Tuesday night which averaged 98.3 mph and maxed out at 101 mph. He had particularly good movement on his two-seamer, not great movement on his four-seamer. Yet, the Giants only swung and missed at four of those pitches and recorded nine hits against them as well.

Fortunately, he induced a ton of ground balls and the infield behind was able to turn at least some – but not all – of the double play opportunities. Their inability to turn three or four double plays resulted in extra pitches thrown under duress by Syndergaard early.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

He began to mix in his curveball in the middle innings, but he was a little too fastball-happy over the first couple of frames. Another part of his problem was his pace. Right of the bat it was slow and he allowed the Giants to control the tempo early on against him. That along with a mysterious reason as to why he didn’t really fool anyone caused the uneven night for the young hurler.

Generally speaking, he pitched better than the line suggests. But the Giants clearly had a good look at the ball last night, and that’s something Syndergaard and Dan Warthen will have to work on before his start on Sunday against the Braves.