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That's what Mickey Callaway has seen in his heart, if not with his eyes, in the first 31 games of this first month of the season. Callaway is a manager now, but he was a pitching coach before, which means that there will always be a plurality of souls who will see the world in the same way as the pitcher: incrementally, piecewise , in pieces.
Even though the EER among Mets starting pitchers has risen above 5.00 in recent weeks, even though the five members have all absorbed shots and sprays at one time or another, Callaway has could use selective memory.
He saw Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom at their best, that is, as good as baseball pitchers. He saw Zack Wheeler and Steven Matz and even Jason Vargas at the top of their games. So he was able to look beyond some implosions of the first round of Matz and Vargas in recent weeks, and some outings where Wheeler seemed to launch BP.
"Novice pitchers feed on each other," Callaway said Thursday morning, "and they push each other. We start to do good, the others want to go beyond. That's what we want to do here.
Even before Noah Syndergaard came out and scored a hat-trick in Little League in a 1-0 win against Cincinnati – 10 strikeouts and a four-shot clean-up on the mound, fortified by a huge homerun Alonso's home opposition calls it "a team of demolishers to a man" – the Mets have achieved their first solid match all year launch pitching:
Matz, Sunday: 7 innings, 5 hits, 2 points.
Wheeler, Monday: 6 innings, 7 hits, 4 points (all in the second inning).
Vargas, Tuesday: 5 ¹ / ₃ innings, 3 hits, 1 point.
DeGrom, Wednesday: 7 innings, 3 hits, 0 points.
The fact that the Mets were only 2-2 in these games (thanks to a pair of circuits in the ninth round ceded by the guy who had been their best pitcher so far, Edwin Diaz) is actually the foreground overall: The Mets were in a position to win all four. That's all that a departing pitcher can do. And that's what these Mets are built on.
The first spasms of the offense that marked March and April have always felt like outliers; This team may not be as controversial as some other Mets teams of the recent vintage, but it was not designed to score six points per game. And that should be fine: the master plan wins much more 3-1 games than 8-7.
"That's what we are," Callaway said. "That's what we expect to be."
Syndergaard, of course, was something to behold. His 104th and final throw was timed at 99.5 mph, and he froze Yasiel Puig for his 10th outing. His white / homer game was not just remarkable, it was one of the rarest things you can see in baseball. In more than 210,000 games played in the history of the major leagues, 23 men launched perfect matches.
But only seven of them did what Syndergaard did: they managed to hold the distance and only give the game of the match with a circuit. Bob Welch was the last to do so 36 years ago.
Syndergaard was stunned, knowing that his arm was what was beating his bread and that his bat was simply a hobby, like collecting stamps. He was much more excited about the shutout, five days after declaring the baseballs in his hands resembled ice cubes, five days after the Brewers beat him and inflated his performance record 6.35.
We are well enough ahead of the season to halve the number of points with a stack of nine zeros. And we are already quite far in the Syndergaard-deGrom partnership at the top of the Mets rotation that Syndergaard is comfortable with admitting when he saw deGrom get rid of his misery on Wednesday early in the season he was eager to try to match him and more.
"Absolutely," he says. "We try to support each other in all possible ways."
Callaway was a blunter: "The guys in a rotation want to outdo the others. The pitching staff are going up this way and I think this one is starting to do something special. The last time of the rotation, you can not ask for anything more. "
The Mets will record a 3-2 record every five days, because 3-2 on 162 days means 97 wins, and 97 wins means the team's vision of the personality will have been fulfilled. It's just a trick in the rotation. But ultimately, Callaway's vision is visible beyond his own eyes and his own heart.
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