Mack Ade - That Was Impressive

The first thing you’re going to read this morning is a bunch of people telling you that the Mets should have promoted Matt Harvey sooner. Save precious time reading them. They are wrong.

People that sit behind laptops don’t stand all day in the pitching cages, clubhouses, bullpens, dugouts, and clubhouses with these guys. Pitching coaches do.

The Mets pay good money to the pitching brain trust to determine when the ‘big four’ (Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Jenrry Mejia, Jeurys Familia) will be ready to pitch Queens (or, in this case, a safe zone like Arizona).

Yes, it’s sometimes confusing, and the path of Mejia makes you dizzy, but there is a method to this madness and all we can do is report the snippets we see when we visit the stadiums, and the results of their collective efforts when an outing is over.

Everything that happens in the minors is practice and has a learning curve. Just because Harvey moves up to the Mets doesn’t mean Wheeler packs his bags in Binghamton. I’ll be the first one to admit we do too much speculation on web sites (I hate the word blog), but the readers love to make up trades and predict the future.

Old school writers, like Kevin Kiernan, still practice the correct approach to the game. He’s the Sgt. Joe Friday (look it up, kids) of the beat writers and he just reports the “facts”. Everyone else is trying to beat each other by being the first person to report something. Some seem to have embedded their hand held into their wrist. All this causes is more confusion and countless retractions.

Last night wasn’t perfect for Mike Harvey. Some will say he was wild (his first warm-up toss before the first inning hit the backstop). Others will tell you how hard it is to tell when his ball moves like it did last night. He was accredited with a wild pitch on a swinging strikeout. That’s impressive.

It’s always pitching. The first half of the season happened because of three players, David Wright, Johan Santana, and RA Dickey. Speculators today will tell you that, if Harvey was in the mix then, the Mets could have been in first place at the ASG break.

Let’s stick to the facts here. This was one great outing. The team played better because of it, the clubhouse was alive, and everyone drove home with a smile on their face.

Enjoy the feeling.