MLB Daily: Matt Harvey Remains Amazing; The Power of Trevor Bauer; MLB's Great New Commercial
By Mike Cardillo
Baseball continues to march on, as do we with this grand experiment of a sports blog post …
All Harvey, All the Time: Matt Harvey is a big deal … and that doesn’t only apply to the people who work for the New York gossip pages or trend pieces. Considering I live near NYC (which I guess I have to apologize for) it’s hard to escape the wide shadow cast by Harvey, aka the Dark Knight, which isn’t a great nickname, truth be told.
Yes, Harvey is a diva. Yes he plays that game where he likes to go out, get shot sitting next to attractive women and then does the whole ‘it’s my personal life’ thing. Whatever. Harvey is, if nothing else, a confident 26 year old at the top of his craft.
Thursday, making his first start since Tommy John surgery, he threw six scoreless vs. the Nationals, striking out nine (Bryce Harper accounted for three) while allowing four hits. In 243+ innings Harvey’s struck out 270 batters with a 0.981 WHIP. Not bad. Not bad at all.
If I was running the Mets (haha), I’d do everything in my power to buy-out some of Harvey’s arbitration years — he’s not even eligible until 2019. He’s only set to make around $650,000 this year and becomes a free agent in 2019. That’s a long time down the road, granted, but the new trend in baseball is for teams to lock up their young players before they hit the market, or pay them significantly more than what they’d make in arbitration i.e. Yordano Ventura and the Royals or Carlos Carrasco and the Indians.
More than that, what better way for Mets ownership, the maligned Wilpons who’ve seen their club turn into a walking LOL the last six years, to build some goodwill than locking down Harvey and quieting the talk he’s destined to wind up with the Yankees, his childhood favorite team?
Nevermind. Harvey’s agent is Scott Boras. Good luck with all that, Mets.
Staying in New York: A-Rod hit a home run, his first since his suspension and 655th overall. Rodriguez needs five homers to pass Willie Mays on the all-time list and collect $6 million from the Yankees. If ever a giant, over-sized novelty check was warranted, it’s for this occasion.
CC Sabathia — in his first start since missing most of 2014 — gave up five runs (four earned) in the loss to the Blue Jays, but he struck out eight in 5 2/3 so the talking heads on YES tried to spin the stat into a positive.
Buried under the New York media bias lede, what a night for Blue Jays starter Daniel Norris and reliever Miguel Castro.
You gotta be bleeping me: Hawk Harrelson is, ahem, an acquired taste to say the least. His reaction to Adam Eaton’s diving catch is pure baseball schmaltz.
Meanwhile the Royals are 3-0 after sweeping the White Sox, proving nobody who writes preseason predictions knows a doggone thing.
Bauer Power: Four Cleveland pitchers took a no-hitter into the ninth vs. the Astros until Jed Lowrie broke it up with a solo shot off Nick Hagadone in the ninth. The standout is starter Trevor Bauer, who fanned 11 in six innings. He walked five, pushing up his pitch count to 111 so there is no possible reason Terry Francona would keep him in the game any longer. Duh. Fortunately there didn’t seem to be anyone — Hawk was probably busy doing a crossword puzzle on the White Sox team charter — moaning about taking Bauer out with a no-hitter intact.
Cleveland’s starting pitching — Corey Kluber, Carrasco and Bauer — was great in Houston, but consider this …
In any event, if Bauer keeps this up hopefully the Internet will start creating some Jack Bauer mash-ups or memes or something.
Days Baseball Has Existed in 2015 Without Dying: Five
Semi-unimportant stat of the day: Six of the nine games played on Thursday finished under three hours. Only the 12-inning Padres/Giants game — featuring Derek Norris vs. Angel Pagan — went over four.
Buck Showalter Acting School: This promo by MLB is very smart on many levels.
[Something about Yardwork goes here.]