If Monday night’s start for Noah Syndergaard wasn’t his best performance of the year, it was certainly one of the more significant and notable starts to date.
He was coming off two unusual starts during which he had pitched well but was forced to deal with a ton of bad luck with some bad execution mixed in.
The results weren’t pretty, either – he had allowed 11 runs on 20 hits with 12 strikeouts in only 11 innings in those outings, going 0-2 in that span.
So on Monday, Syndergaard was tasked with making some adjustments against the Blue Jays, one of the game’s best offenses and a team that had averaged 8.8 runs scored during the 11-game winning streak they marched into Citi Field with.
And he did, which was very significant to his manager.
“It means a lot,” Terry Collins said about Syndergaard’s ability to shut the Toronto offense down. “These guys are the hottest team in baseball, they’ve got a tremendous lineup, and after the first inning, he took control of it. I was very impressed with the way he went about it.”
Things didn’t start off particularly well for Syndergaard, as he allowed a long solo home run to Jose Bautista followed by a walk to Edwin Encarnacion and a single to Chris Colabello, but he was able to miss Dioner Navarro’s bat and struck him out to end the threat and limit what looked like major damage ensuing.
From there, things just seemed to click for Syndergaard – he only allowed one walk the rest of the way and struck out nine batters between the second and sixth innings.
“They’ve got a deadly lineup,” Syndergaard explained about his outing on Monday. “They’ve got the potential to do some serious damage and it instills a lot of confidence in myself that I can go out and have success like that against a caliber of a team like that.
“I felt I could throw anything – fastball, curveball, changeup – in any count tonight,” Syndergaard continued. “That’s ultimately the reason why I had so much success.”
Syndergaard credited a minor mechanical adjustment in-between starts for his improvements on Monday night.
His fastball is what it is – pure heat. But Toronto showed early they were on that pitch, and i. But his dominance was magnified by his curveball and change-up which were tremendous keys for him on Monday. The Blue Jays swung and missed at 11 of the 18 curves and change-ups Syndergaard threw for strikes, and those were truly the neutralizing forces for Syndergaard in his outing. Early on, he was a little fastball happy and that got him into trouble in the first inning. But he clearly became aware of that and wisely changed gears, taking a shade off his fastball and throwing those off-speed pitches to effectively shut Toronto down for the next five minutes.
If not for his 32-pitch first inning, he might have been able to save the bullpen by going another frame, which could have changed the outcome for him. Even so, he deserved a win for his effort and nearly had one on Monday night.
But the adjustment he made after that first inning showed the baseball maturity the club had been waiting for before his promotion. When he was struggling last year, Syndergaard got very fastball-happy and didn’t use his off-speed pitches to work out of jams and limit damage. But he’s shown a renewed ability to do that this season, and while he’s endured some growing pains here, he has gotten through them and really started to live up to all of the hype that’s surrounded him since he was acquired from the team he nearly beat on Monday.
On Monday, Sandy Alderson said it was possible the club could shift Syndergaard to the bullpen in an effort to limit his innings, but the team has said all along it was unlikely to occur. And, after the outing he had on Monday night against an incredible offense, they’d be hard pressed to use that as the solution, as he showed he belongs in a big league starting rotation.
Here are highlights from Syndergaard’s start against Toronto on Monday:
Just Mets 