Justin Verlander falls while walking tightrope for Mets
Mets starting pitcher Justin Verlander reacts during the fifth inning against the Dodgers in an MLB game at Citi Field on Friday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Sometimes it feels like overkill to constantly bring up Justin Verlander’s $43.3 million salary for this season. He’s a future Hall of Famer coming off his third Cy Young Award. Those tend to cost a lot.
But Verlander is paid specifically for games like the one Friday night, the start of a critical 17-day stretch that is likely to determine the fate of Steve Cohen’s record-setting $377 million bid for a World Series.
And with so much at stake, Verlander again was a disappointment. At a time when the Mets are relying on their $128.6 million rotation — more than the entire payroll of a dozen teams — to salvage their season and avoid a surrender sell-off at the Aug. 1 deadline, Verlander failed to blaze the trail. Instead, he helped steer the 2023 Mets a little closer to oblivion.
To be fair, the Mets had only one hit, Brandon Nimmo’s leadoff double in the first inning, as they went down meekly to the Dodgers, 6-0, on a boo-filled night at Citi Field.
Without a run, Verlander probably wasn’t to change his team’s fortunes anyway. But six walks in five innings, his highest total in six years? Somehow walking the bottom of the Dodgers’ order in the fifth to set up Mookie Bett’s RBI single and a two-run double by Freddie Freeman? Throwing nearly half of his 104 pitches for balls?
That’s not the leadership of an ace, never mind the record paycheck. It looks more like a 40-year-old struggling for answers, and Verlander certainly didn’t provide any, other than maybe nudging general manager Billy Eppler closer to sell mode.
“I don’t know, I just lost my feel a little bit,” said Verlander, who slipped to 3-5 with a 3.72 ERA. “Inexcusable. I can’t walk six guys and expect to win a ballgame or give your team a chance.”
With Verlander coming up small, next is Kodai Senga, who is developing into the rotation’s true ace. After him, it’s Max Scherzer for Sunday — or at least that’s what the Mets have in mind. Best to write his starts in pencil, as manager Buck Showalter was unsure of Scherzer’s status for much of Friday afternoon.
Just what the Mets needed coming out of the break — more intrigue.
They’re already clinging to the periphery of the wild-card cliff by their fingernails — they’re eight games out of the NL’s last playoff spot with six teams to jump — so the task of climbing back into contention is formidable enough for Showalter & Co. But wondering yet again about Scherzer’s availability, after his flaky first half, was too familiar, in the worst possible way.
Showalter may talk about a dozen or more keys to unlock the potential of his underachieving Mets, but there is none bigger at the moment than the rotation. Whether it’s up to the task is debatable, and from what we’ve witnessed to this point, the evidence would suggest “no.”
The Mets’ rotation entered Friday with a 4.57 ERA, tied for 20th with the Nationals, and a 1.41 WHIP that ranked them 24th, same as the Royals. That’s not good company to keep.
Friday night was another chance for Verlander to reverse this demoralizing trend, and the Mets were 27-4 when a starter completes six innings, which doesn’t seem like a huge ask from a rotation with these resumes — and contracts. But the next two weeks will be the first look at the group deployed as intended — with Jose Quintana finally joining the rotation — as long as everybody is capable of doing so, which apparently was in doubt despite the four-day All-Star break. Despite Scherzer’s brief alarm, it appears the Mets will have them to rely on for the immediate future.
Eppler explained that Scherzer showed up with a “little stiffness in his neck” after the break, which he attributed to sleeping in a bad position. The GM said this current issue is unrelated to the neck spasms that caused him to be scratched from a May start, but we are talking about a pitcher who’ll turn 39 in two weeks.
That’s been the root of the Mets’ rotation-driven agita in the first half and is going to haunt them in the second: the two senior citizens at the front end. Scherzer pitched to a 4.31 ERA through his 16 starts before the break and was last seen getting whacked around in San Diego by Manny Machado, who took him deep twice (five RBIs) during Sunday’s momentum-killing 6-2 loss to the Padres in the first-half finale.
Factor in Verlander’s subpar first half, coming off the shoulder-muscle strain that cost him five weeks, and the Mets are getting a lousy payoff for the $86.6 million spent on their pair of three-time Cy Young Award winners.
“One of the things we talked about with Max early on was the inconsistent trajectory because of the little ailments he had going on and then the suspension time period,” Eppler said before Friday’s game. “With Justin, it was getting that issue kind of in his rearview mirror, and the further he gets from that, some of the better quality stuff we’ve seen. So I think it’s just getting that stuff further in their background.”
Either that, or the 2023 Mets could be history by the end of this month.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
