The Nationals Brought The Deadball Era Back For A Day, Lose to Steven Matz and the Mets
On Tuesday, the National bats were out in full force as the team hit 5 homers and brought the steroid era back for a game. That was not the case yesterday when Washington was stifled for 6 hits and a runner made it to scoring position just twice in a 2-0 loss to the Mets.
Harper got the day off and Murphy tossed up another multi-hit performance but Steven Matz was everything that Harvey was not and the Nats just could not handle him yesterday. Roark pitched very effectively and made it 7 innings while allowing just 1 earned run – aside from one hiccup on 5/14, Roark has been absolutely phenomenal and is certainly not tipping pitches any more.
I bashed Matt Harvey yesterday and every single one of the points that I made about him still stand. Harvey has shown time and time again that he is mentally weak and that he has a rather selfish attitude, now he’s just not good on top of all of those undesirable traits. I don’t care if Harvey gains a mile back on his fastball, I am not afraid of him and the Nats know how to get to him. I am, however, pretty scared of Steven Matz.
Matz, a rookie, had a 2.27 ERA in 6 MLB starts last year, a 2.25 career ERA in the minors, and a 2.36 ERA thus far this year. More amazingly, Matz had a pretty rough first outing of the season but, since then, he has allowed just 6 earned runs in 48 innings (1.13 ERA). The Mets do have great pitching but its some combination of deGrom, Syndergaard, and Matz rather than deGrom, Syndergaard, and Harvey. At the same time, it will be very interesting to see how Matz performs in the later half of the season once fatigue starts to set in and teams start seeing him and getting more comfortable with him. Matz has never thrown more than 140 innings in a season and, while he looks like an ace now, we should learn a lot from his 2nd half performances. There isn’t too much more to say about yesterday’s game. Do I particularly love the fact that Dusty hit Michael A Taylor and his .235 OBP first and Jayson Werth (.292 OBP) second? Not at all but yesterday’s lineup certainly won’t become a permanent thing and the duo did collect a third of the team’s total hits. We’ve got a pretty important home series against the Cardinals up now where the Nats will try to hold on to their division lead on New York.