PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. – You pick your spots in March, you sift through the pitches and the innings, you build up, you kick kinks out, you – all together now – “get your work in.” And sometimes you are presented with a moment when you can actually test yourself, see if what’s worked before can work again.
That’s where Matt Harvey found himself Sunday afternoon, second inning at Tradition Field, 8,205 people buzzing, the Yankees in the house. Harvey is past the point where he needs the radar gun to offer him support – he hit 99 that first time out against the Tigers. That was enough.
He is past the point where he even thinks about snapping off his slider and wondering if his elbow will rebel. And he’s not yet at the point where anything he does besides piling up pitches and innings and time, more time, truly matters.
“I’m concentrating on throwing strikes and pounding the strike zone,” he would say later. “On picking up where I left off. I know I can run it up if I have to.”
Still: Every now and again, it’s good to have something resembling a meaningful moment in these exhibitions, good to have a reason to run it up. Here it was. Mark Teixiera led off the inning with a flare to left for a single. He stunned everyone in the ballpark — maybe even his own two legs — by stealing second.
Up close, you could see Harvey stiffen.
“The sonofagun doesn’t want to give up a thing,” Mets manager Terry Collins would say after the Mets’ 6-0 win. “Not even in spring training. You could see it. You could see it.”
Garrett Jones was up, legit major leaguer, legit lefty swinger. Harvey could have gone with what would get him through the rest of his day, through 59 pitches and 47 strikes and 5 2/3 innings: easy gas, good (but not top-drawer) breaking stuff. Maybe Jones grounds sharply to the right side, upping the odds Teixeira would score on an out.
But Harvey didn’t want Teixeira to score. This wasn’t a time to get his work in. This was a time to ask himself a question:
Can I strike this guy out?
He struck the guy out. He nearly twisted Jones into a pretzel with his best curveball on the day, and then strike three came on a 95-mph fastball that Jones could barely wave at. The rest of the inning was routine. The rest of the game was a piece of cake.
But that one at-bat …
That’s the biggest hint he’s given — and he’s gotten — that he really might pick up where he left off.
“Good practice,” is what Harvey would call it later. “Getting used to what happens when runners are on base. You don’t want it to be a situation where that happens and suddenly you don’t know what to do.”
He knew what to do. It won’t always be that easy. It won’t always be that simple. And simulations aren’t real-game situations, no matter how much you can pretend.
“Hey, what he’s telling you,” Collins said, “is you’re not scoring. That’s just the way he is, it’s the trait he has, you could see that when he came up, and you could see that two years ago. And that’s what makes him special for me.”
And he isn’t alone in the Mets clubhouse.
“He gives us a pretty good chance to win,” said David Wright, coming back from his own injuries, who was given his own dose of favorable news when he drove a 2-1 CC Sabathia fastball over the right-field wall.
Wright was smiling, understanding he was understating, but clearly as impressed as his manager was.
Look, there are a lot of things that have to go right between now and Labor Day for the Mets to be what they insist they can be, a player in the race for the five National League playoff spots. Two of those things are Harvey’s elbow and Wright’s shoulder. It’s a beginning.
Same as one at-bat in the second inning of a meaningless game is a beginning. There are no guarantees, and the Mets aren’t asking for any. Just signs. Just hints. Just a little trace evidence of better times ahead. Just a place to start. This was a place to start.