Mets' David Peterson has left shoulder inflammation, but no damage

The Mets’ second-best starting pitcher this season hopes to be back soon.

A Tuesday MRI on David Peterson’s left shoulder revealed inflammation — but no structural damage — he said Wednesday. The Mets don’t know how long he will stay on the injured list, but for now the plan is for Peterson to rest for a couple of days and see how his arm reacts.

Peterson, who turns 25 next month, has a 2.91 ERA through four starts, a pleasant surprise in place of Marcus Stroman and a boon to a rotation that has needed to be patched together.

“I’m not worried about it, but we’ll see how the next couple days go,” Peterson said.

Manager Luis Rojas said: “The results came back with good news saying that it was a mild inflammation there, no structural damage in the shoulder. Right now, it’s treatment, just let the inflammation kind of like go down and see where we go from there.”

That alleviated concerns after Peterson woke up Tuesday with his shoulder feeling “weird,” as Rojas put it. The Mets scratched him from his scheduled start that night and had him checked out. Peterson left his most recent start — last week against the Nationals — with what he described as normal soreness/fatigue.

Peterson joins a long list of starting pitchers who have hit the IL this year. One school of thought within the game is that this year’s pandemic-wrecked schedule, including the three-week preseason camp in July, is contributing to injuries.

“A shortened spring training, I think we knew it was going to affect some people,” Peterson said. “I’m not going to put that as the label of the cause of this inflammation, but, I mean, who knows? It’s affected some guys already. We’ve seen that league-wide.”

This is the second time a Mets starting pitcher has been diagnosed with shoulder inflammation, following Michael Wacha, who has been sidelined since Aug. 9.

Wacha threw a four-inning, 59-pitch simulated game against Mets minor-leaguers in Brooklyn on Tuesday.

Rojas said he doesn’t know yet if Wacha will need another practice outing.

“He stated that he felt good,” Rojas said.

A Matz mystery

Steven Matz’s turn in the rotation comes up again Thursday, but as of Wednesday afternoon Rojas still was not ready to announce whether he would get the ball.

Rojas said he was not worried about the ambiguousness — and the lack of commitment to Matz — affecting the lefthander’s confidence.

“He’s ready,” Rojas said. “He’s ready to get the ball whenever he’s going to get it.”

Since Matz’s most recent start, when the Phillies tagged him for six runs in 4 1/3 innings to raise his ERA to 9.00, he has been working mostly with pitching coach Jeremy Hefner.

“I had very short, short conversations with him,” Rojas said. “But the real work is being put by Hef and him in order to get him back on track so he can execute those pitches and he can sequence them better.”

McNeil, Gimenez sit

Although Jeff McNeil and Andres Gimenez are both a bit banged up, Rojas said their absence from the lineup Wednesday was routine.

“Just a quick day off for him,” Rojas said of McNeil, who has seemingly not been playing at full speed since suffering a left knee bone bruise last week. “He was moving OK. There’s nothing that he complained about [Tuesday].”

Gimenez was on the bench for the third game in a row after starting 11 of the previous 13 games. He recently fouled a ball off his ankle.

“We gave it some time to see what he can do,” Rojas said. “But he's fine. He's walking. He's doing everything. He's been getting his playing time coming in as a defensive sub. He's gotten a couple of at-bats. Not concerned with him. He's fine.”