It was a classic pitchers’ duel from start to finish on Sunday afternoon, and while Matt Harvey came out on the wrong end of a 1-0 score against the Miami Marlins’ Jose Fernandez, he still had a good deal to feel positive about.
Harvey matched the fiery Fernandez for seven solid innings in what was his second straight strong start in a season that, until now, was full of struggles. He allowed just one earned run and four hits, with three strikeouts and no walks, almost duplicating the seven shutout innings he threw against the Chicago White Sox on Monday last week.
“It’s still two starts; and obviously, the massive struggles that happened before, the only thing you want to think of is not letting that kind of creep back in,” said Harvey, who is an unbecoming 4-8 on the season, but no doubt in a better frame of mind than he was a week ago.
Or, as he put it to reporters after the game: “Feeling pretty good is definitely a positive.’’
It was Harvey’s bad luck that Fernandez was just a little bit sharper on Sunday, matching his career high with 14 strikeouts over seven innings and allowing just four hits on 100 pitches, 73 of which were strikes.
Harvey was almost as precise, with 70 strikes across 104 pitches.
Fernandez improved to 9-2 this season and is on a roll. Harvey has definitely not been, but he still has much of the season to truly turn things around.
Fernandez and Harvey made for an intriguing matchup. They share the same agent in the formidable Scott Boras and have had a similar career arc — right-handers who displayed dominance early on, only to succumb to injury and have to work their way back after Tommy John surgery.
Harvey’s only real mistake on Sunday came in the bottom of the fifth, when he left a pitch up in the strike zone that Miami’s Derek Dietrich smacked for a double off the fence in center field. Marlins catcher J.T. Realmuto then drove in Dietrich with a single up the middle on a 2-0 pitch, giving Fernandez all the support he needed.
“You don’t want to give up a run in a tight ball game like that, but I left a pitch over the plate and he got on second and then I made a pretty good pitch to Realmuto and he hit it up the middle,” Harvey said. “In that situation, I wanted a ground ball; I got it, it just wasn’t at somebody.”
Mets manager Terry Collins was enthused by Harvey’s performance, and why not?
“I think he threw the ball great, and I thought he really pitched today,” Collins said. “He moved the ball around, you saw him pitch inside, and he made very, very few mistakes. The ball up to Dietrich’s probably the only mistake he made, so I thought he threw the ball great.”
“I think it’s going to ease Matt’s mind most of all, and that’s the one that counts,’’ Collins added. “He felt good about what he did today, how he got through it.’’
Rivera, who has been behind the plate for each of Harvey’s last two starts, seemed similarly pleased.
“If you ask the other side how Harvey threw, they’d tell you the same thing — that he was good, he was nasty, and that’s how the 1-0 games go,” he said.
When Fernandez made his debut as a rookie in 2013 and took the National League by storm, Harvey was having a Cy Young Award-worthy season himself before tearing an elbow ligament that August. He missed all of 2014 and then more or less returned to form last year, going 13-8 with a 2.71 ERA and 188 strikeouts in helping the Mets reach the post-season.
However, that was also when Boras pointedly expressed concern about how many innings Harvey was pitching in his first season back from surgery.
In the end, Harvey did keep pitching, throwing 26 innings in the post-season, including eight-plus innings in the final game of the World Series, against the Kansas City Royals.
How much that heavy workload has been responsible for his rocky start this season is up for debate, but in any case he now appears to be finding his form.
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