5:55 p.m. EDT October 24, 2015 NEW YORK — Matt Harvey will start Tuesday’s Game 1 of the World Series for the New York Mets against the Kansas City Royals and will be followed in order by fellow righthanders Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard in Games 2 and 3 and then left-hander Steven Matz in Game 4.
The all 27-and-under rotation includes two rookies (Syndergaard and Matz) and two precocious All-Stars (deGrom and Harvey). All of them had a 3.25 ERA or better this season, and they comprise baseball’s hardest-throwing staff. The starters had a 2.65 ERA with 69 strikeouts in 54 1/3 innings during the first two rounds.
After telling the pitchers what the rotation would be, manager Terry Collins said he turned toward Harvey and asked him, “Are you ready?”
“He looked at me,” Collins recalled, “and said, ‘Damn right.’”
Harvey, the 2013 All-Star Game starter and top-10 draft pick, will be making the Game 1 start two years and five days after he underwent Tommy John surgery. He was 13-8 with a 2.71 ERA and 188 strikeouts in 189 1/3 innings since returning to action this season.
He had public disagreements with the organization about aggressively wanting to return to game action at the end of the 2014 season. Early in the 2015 campaign, he voiced his displeasure about a six-man rotation and occasionally having starts skipped.
Then at the start of September, his agent, Scott Boras, said Harvey’s surgeon had imposed an innings limit of 180 that he should not exceed, even in the playoffs. Soon thereafter, Harvey declared that he would pitch in the postseason and has, in fact, reached 202 combined innings this year.
“I understand the risks,” Harvey, the New York City bureau chief of The Players’ Tribune, wrote at the time. “I am also fully aware of the opportunity the Mets have this postseason.”
Drawing the Game 1 assignment means Harvey is slated to pitch again in Game 5 and, possibly, even in relief during Game 7. Collins said the pitcher was determined to help however he could.
“He said, ‘I’ll be ready,’” Collins said. “That’s the only guy I know.”
Collins has said that deGrom — who has been the club’s best starter this season — has looked a little fatigued, so that was a contributing factor to pushing him back a day to Game 2. He is the only Met already to start three games this postseason.
“I thought Jake could use an extra day,” Collins said. “We see the benefits of how he pitches when he’s a little better rested at this time of year.”
During the regular season, Syndergaard was markedly better home at Citi Field (7-2, 2.46) than on the road (2-5, 4.23), which is part of the reason he draws the Game 3 home opener.
Matz has only made eight career big league starts — six regular season and two postseason — but has a 2.58 ERA in those 45 1/3 innings.
Each of the four starters is able to pump fastballs of 95 mph or faster; the Mets, in fact, led the majors in such high-velocity pitches, accounting for 22% of all offerings. The Royals’ pitchers, incidentally, were second at 15% and their hitters led the majors with a .284 average against 95-plus pitches and ranked second with .436 slugging.
The Royals have not yet announced their rotation.
