Max Scherzer's return delayed by Mets' rainout Saturday
The MLB baseball game at Citi Field on Saturday, April 29, 2023 between the New York Mets and Atlanta has been postponed due to rain. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Max Scherzer won’t get to face Atlanta in this series after all.
The Mets’ Saturday evening contest against their division rival was postponed because of rain and rescheduled as part of a split-admission doubleheader on Aug. 12, during Atlanta’s only other visit to Citi Field this season.
The rainout turned a four-game weekend wraparound set into a three-gamer — thus excluding Scherzer. He is serving a 10-game suspension for violating MLB’s foreign-substance policy and now won’t be eligible to return until Tuesday, when the Mets visit the Tigers, at the earliest. He had been lined up to pitch Monday in the finale against Atlanta.
Scherzer dropped his appeal of the suspension on the day the league punished him, April 20, in part so he could return for this series. He said then that the Mets asked him to do so, so he did. Despite insisting that he had only rosin and sweat on his hand against the Dodgers on April 19, he also believed he would not win his appeal anyway.
Now the Mets’ first turn in the rotation with both of their aces, Scherzer and Justin Verlander, likely will feature both pitchers going against the Tigers, for whom they were teammates from 2010-14. Verlander is expected to make his first Mets start Wednesday or Thursday after missing the first month-plus of the season because of a strained teres major, a muscle near his right armpit.
The Mets’ starting pitchers for the rest of the Atlanta matchups, meanwhile, remain fill-ins. Tylor Megill, who had been scheduled for Saturday, got pushed back to Sunday. He is due to face Spencer Strider, who has a 1.80 ERA, a 0.83 WHIP and 49 strikeouts in 30 innings in his first five starts. Megill started strong but has endured mediocre outings against the Dodgers and Giants in his past two tries.
The Mets have not publicly committed to a Sunday-turned-Monday starter. That is Jose Butto’s spot, but manager Buck Showalter seemed very much open to other options after Butto struggled, particularly with his control, against the Nationals on Tuesday.
Among the alternatives: Stephen Nogosek, who is expected back from the injured list Sunday, as an opener ahead of Butto or as the first in a series of relievers in a bullpen game. After two days off — David Peterson pitched all five innings in the rain-shortened Friday game and no one pitched Saturday — the Mets’ bullpen will head into Sunday well rested.
Of course, these teams aren’t done yet with the bad weather. Rain was forecast to stop overnight but pick up again by noon Sunday and continue throughout the day. Another rainout would mean either a doubleheader Monday — Showalter loathes doubleheaders but these teams might not have a better choice — or pushing Scherzer back yet another day to Wednesday.
Atlanta will return for a series Aug. 11-13, the middle of the Mets’ longest homestand of the season.
Fans who had tickets for Saturday’s game can use them for the first game of the Aug. 12 doubleheader (1:10 p.m.). Fans who had tickets for Aug. 12 can use them for the second game (7:15 p.m.).
Under a new schedule setup this season, a team will play the other clubs in its division only 13 times instead of 19 times — two series at home and two series away instead of three and three. That arrangement, agreed upon by MLB and the players’ union last year as part of the negotiations that ended the lockout, complicates rescheduling postponements. But MLB sought the change to enable every team to play every other team for at least one series every year.
Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.
