Tuesdays with Brownie: Blame for Mets' situation falls on one man
(A weekly look at the players, teams, trends, up-shoots and downspouts shaping the 2015 season.)
This isn’t Matt Harvey’s fault. This isn’t the fault of his team or his agent or the doctor who fixed Harvey’s elbow.
It’s Terry Collins’ fault.
Collins, after all, has managed the New York Mets to the brink of their first NL East title in nine years, and none of this would have come up had the Mets been irrelevant like they were supposed to be. It’s the Washington Nationals’ fault too, a little.
The 185-inning limit on Harvey, according to sources, was hard and fast and not to be strayed from. Everyone involved agreed. The only way it would become an issue was if the Mets – ha-ha – were somehow to scrape together all this young pitching and make do without David Wright and have Curtis Granderson become good again and then have the front office hit it rich at the trading deadline.
Then the Nationals would have to tank, and at some point the Mets would have to take advantage of that and believe in all of this.
Ta-da.
I don’t know if another man would have led the Mets to the same outcome – the verge of the same outcome – that Collins did. What I know is that Collins was the only guy on this particular top step, juggling six-man rotations, six-foot egos, a desperate fan base leaning over his shoulder, a front office that didn’t always seem to know exactly what it wanted, and about a thousand other things spread over six months.
Collins was hired almost five years ago to replace Jerry Manuel and ostensibly to get the franchise, when it was ready to win, to the next guy. It became awkward only because the players arrived and were ready to be good at this, and also because Collins gathered them up and herded them in a healthy, productive direction.
Collins is 66 years old. He’s lost games and won them. He’s lost clubhouses and won them. He’s walked all the roads and done all the jobs. It’s what makes him authentic and likely more effective as a leader than he’s ever been. He fits in New York, where the first requirement is – or should be – honesty. He fits in that clubhouse for the same reason. I’m not sure Collins has the time or patience for phony anymore.
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In a league of Joe Maddon, Clint Hurdle, Mike Matheny and Don Mattingly, who’ve won their games and will get their Manager of the Year votes, nobody’s done more and put up with more and bled more freely than Collins. For a summer, he’s been the best of any of them.
Not that it’s over. He’ll still have to walk to the mound at some point and request the ball from a rested and effective and bull-headed Harvey, who’ll have developed a temporary case of amnesia. But that’ll be part of it, part of the whole Harvey mess.
But Collins only brought it on himself … by winning all these games.
No easy way for Matt Harvey
That said, Matt Harvey’s got to pick a lane.
He is a grown man, 26 years old, facing a difficult decision, one that could run his career – his life, even – in so many directions. Harvey, who has thrown 176 2/3 innings with 12 games left in the Mets' schedule, is surrounded by strong adult figures with strong opinions, people with his best interests in their hearts but also their own to abide by. They’ve gotten him this far, too, to where he perhaps hasn’t had to make too many consequential decisions, beyond fastball or changeup.
So here he is, to pitch and help the Mets and win the hearts of Mets fans, or to part-time pitch and help the Mets a little and possibly hurt them and risk the ire of Mets fans. And all for a hazy concept of elbow preservation that may or may not be real, along with – let’s be honest – a quarter of a billion dollars that may or may not be waiting.
It’s a lot to consider. Harvey is not a bad person, or a soft person, or a greedy person, for hesitating. He has one pitching arm. One career. The Mets will have many seasons of baseball.
It is, however, time to make that decision, and then to defend it. He cannot act the victim, not as a 26-year-old, as a grown man, as the one in charge of what happens from here. When Terry Collins removes him from a game, Collins owes him no explanation. When Collins explains himself as a courtesy, Harvey should look him in the eye and thank him for his time and concern.
When reporters ask him if he is on board with the club’s decision to limit his innings and therefore put itself at risk for games such as Sunday night’s, Harvey must be accountable for his part in that. The plan, after all, is his. The agent works for him. The doctor is merely guessing. The team has its own agenda.
Matt Harvey is in the middle. That’s why he has to decide. More, he has to own it, whatever it is and whatever becomes of that. He may as well get used to it, because he has a whole life of the same ahead.
A truly lame situation
Eleven days have passed since reports surfaced that Detroit Tigers manager Brad Ausmus would be fired in 24 days. The Tigers have responded by winning some of their games. The bullpen has responded by being worse than ever. (Anymore, it’s unclear if box scores are listing Tigers relievers’ ERAs or their hat sizes. It’s close.) Additionally, David Price hasn’t won a single game for the Tigers since, and Yoenis Cespedes does not have a single hit for them since. Makes it kind of hard to win, but the Tigers have hung in there in spite of these obvious flaws.
Ten days have passed since general manager Al Avila, on the job for just more than a month, issued a statement that said, in essence, “Well, hey, that’s not necessarily true but it might be. I’ll get back to you, K?”
Which is all kinds of crappy for Brad Ausmus, who, given the man he is and the public nature of his teetering job status, deserves better than to spend these weeks in humiliating limbo.
There is nothing to learn here about Ausmus. He manages a team that was flawed before it was picked over at the trading deadline. He manages it in September, from 15 or 16 games behind in the AL Central, with a bullpen only slightly more stable than Curt Schilling’s Twitter account.
By now, he is qualified to be your manager or not. The notion he will be reviewed in October, after being measured in September, is insulting to a man who deserves better. Presumably Avila and Mike Ilitch know this and would not so corner Ausmus, which would be beneath the organization. So we’d expect word Ausmus will be back any day now.
A potential ace rounding into form
The Arizona Diamondbacks, like most, have stuff to fix this winter, their second under Tony La Russa and Dave Stewart, seeing as they’re mediocre again and the Dodgers aren’t getting any poorer.
They’re sliding into their fourth consecutive dark October, and their seventh in eight seasons, yet there is reasonably good news as far as making up ground on the Dodgers and, presumably, an even-year Giants team. That is, they hit all year, they defended, the bullpen held up, and it looks like they’ll be adding an ace.
His name is Patrick Corbin.
When we last left Corbin, the left-hander was tiptoeing into his comeback season, some 16 months after Tommy John surgery, unhurried in a division in which the Diamondbacks were left behind months ago. His July 4 start was his first since September 2013, and the eight that followed revealed a pitcher seeking reassurance from his elbow, along with any other body parts that lagged behind.
The five since: 31 1/3 innings, 1.44 ERA, 25 strikeouts, two walks. Both walks came in the first of those five starts, Aug. 26 against the Cardinals, so Corbin has not walked a batter in his last 25 1/3 innings. The velocity is better than it was pre-surgery. The slider is sharp, especially so across seven shutout innings Saturday in San Francisco.
This was the pitcher who was developing into a No. 1 before the elbow pain, the MRI, the examination, the surgery and the rehab. You know the story.
“My arm is catching up,” he told reporters afterward. “My body is getting used to doing this again.”
The Diamondbacks, then, are a couple starting pitchers from being legit. Not that that’s easy, or cheap, but at least it’s obvious.
Brewers going with youth movement
David Stearns graduated from Harvard (eight years ago), worked under the likes of Dave Littlefield, Omar Minaya, Dan Halem, Chris Antonetti, Mark Shapiro and Jeff Luhnow, grew up in New York a Mets fan, wears a nice suit and practical watch, is 30 years old, looks it, and on Monday became the general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers.
What we know is he is bright (he briefly considered and rejected a career in journalism), respected and quite likely the right man to take a shot at reviving the Brewers. What we don’t know yet is how, beyond the usual references to drafting smart, developing wisely and sorting the good players from the average. He did speak Monday of being fond of manager Craig Counsell, whose record since replacing Ron Roenicke is 56-69, so it would seem there’ll be no change there.
The past 13 months haven’t been the best for the Brewers, an otherwise competent franchise that led the NL Central in mid-August of last season and has played .400 ball since. They’re trending poorly and are in a bad division for mediocre.
So along comes Stearns, who just finished having a hand in the Houston Astros’ rebuild, and he said exactly what you think he would: “I would not have come here if I did not believe it was possible to win a World Series in Milwaukee.”
He’ll have to climb over the Chicago Cubs, Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Cardinals just to start. It could take some time, energy and patience. But, hey, he’s young, and no one who knows him is betting against it.
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