MIAMI -- Asdrubal Cabrera began with his bat and worked his way around his body, looking for any piece of equipment to fling away in disgust. He had just struck out, the 11th member of the Mets to do so against Marlins ace Jose Fernandez, and the frustration of a difficult afternoon had bubbled up.
Cabrera’s helmet went flying next, followed by his batting gloves. When he ran out of items to toss aside, he stood with his shoulders slumped, like a punched-out boxer, waiting for a teammate to retrieve his glove from the dugout.
So it went for the banged-up Mets, 1-0 losers to the Marlins on Sunday, despite another encouraging outing by Matt Harvey. But even if Harvey had been at his best, nobody could hang with Fernandez, who tied his career high with 14 strikeouts in seven shutout innings. It came against a mishmash of a Mets lineup held together with little more than duct tape and prayers.
Harvey lived up to his end of a pitcher’s duel. After tossing seven scoreless frames in his previous outing on Monday, he strung together four more, pushing his streak to 11. The stretch ended when J.T. Realmuto’s RBI single in the fifth scored Derek Dietrich.
It would be the only run that Harvey allowed in seven innings, during which he struck out just three but walked none. His fastball velocity roared up to 97 mph, gaining steam as the game went along.
But Fernandez proved too dominant an adversary for the Mets, who nonetheless left Miami with a series victory.
The Mets mustered just one hint of resistance, stringing together back-to-back two-out singles in the seventh inning. But when challenged to elevate his game, Fernandez dispatched Wilmer Flores with a nasty curveball.
Fernandez stormed off the mound, pounding his chest and hip, a sense of invisibility radiating with every step.
Indeed, the afternoon packed a sense of inevitability, as if Harvey’s participation in the affair would be strictly incidental.
On one side stood Fernandez, a talent at the height of his powers, who retired 15 in a row at one point.
On the other side stood the Mets, a collection of walking wounded that left Terry Collins wallowing in his own gallows humor. In recent days, the Mets manager reduced his job to simply making sure that he has nine names to write in the lineup.
Collins barely made the cut on Sunday. Yoenis Cespedes was still battling a sore hip, though he was available to fly out as a pinch-hitter. Juan Lagares was diagnosed with a sprained right thumb, though he was not placed on the DL.
Instead, Lagares will visit Mets doctors in New York on Monday, leaving Collins shorthanded one more.
When asked if the switch would last more than a day, Collins offered a response that underscored his quandary.
“I haven’t the faintest idea how to answer that because we may only have seven guys tomorrow,” he said. “So, until I know who the hell I’ve got, he’s going to hit third today.”
With the team’s trainers working overtime, Collins has been forced to consider the uncomfortable trade-off of using some of his starting pitchers as pinch-hitters. That responsibility fell to the pitchers, Collins joked, because he had already ruled out his base coaches Tom Goodwin and Tim Teufel.
“Somebody’s go up there,” Collins said. “Goody can’t hit anymore, he’s got a bad hip, so we can’t run him up there. Teufel has lost the shimmy, the Shuffle, so it’s going to have to be one of those guys.”
Indeed, Sunday brought another reminder that help may be a ways off.
Catcher Travis d’Arnaud began a rehab assignment with Class-A St. Lucie, though he served as the designated hitter. There is no timetable for when his right rotator cuff will be healthy enough to begin throwing to the bases, which in turn leaves his return date open-ended.
First baseman Lucas Duda joined the team from the Mets’ complex in Port St. Lucie. But the stress fracture in his back has limited his activity to riding an exercise bike. His return is still being measured in weeks, not days.
..... - Newsday