Injuries and bad luck but Mets' rotation might be OK
New York Mets starting pitcher José Butto delivers against the Washington Nationals during the first inning of an MLB baseball game at Citi Field on Tuesday, April 25, 2023. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The Mets’ efforts to build a super-rotation this past winter relied on strategic planning and piles of cash.
But on Tuesday, with that starting staff in ruin and the Mets scrambling for a last-minute arm, they needed a reliever named Edwin Uceta to come up with an ankle sprain just to allow for the return of Jose Butto.
Butto is the seventh starting pitcher the Mets have used since this season began, but he’s actually No. 9 on the depth chart when you consider that Justin Verlander and Jose Quintana have yet to throw a meaningful pitch. Before too long, a No. 9 starter looks like one — especially rushed up from Triple-A Syracuse, on eight days' rest — and Butto’s six walks in 4 2/3 innings were the most by a Mets starter in two years in the 5-0 loss to the Nats.
“I battled as best I could,” said Butto, who allowed two earned runs, including a homer to Keibert Ruiz.
Butto, you may remember, was the emergency starter back on April 16 when the Mets abruptly swapped him for Max Scherzer in that series finale against the A’s. At that time, Scherzer was still eligible to pitch, but required an extended rest because of a back condition. When Scherzer finally did take the mound the following Wednesday in L.A., his stay was brief — only three innings, as he was ejected for sticky hands and promptly suspended for 10 games.
Every team is beset by injuries or bad luck or some combination of the two. For the Mets, it’s been next level, and we’re only in the last week of April. It’s hard to rationalize how a rotation could lose four of its five starters before finishing the first month of the season, but that’s where Buck Showalter & Co. stood on Tuesday night.
“It’s hard,” Showalter said before the game. “We we’re hoping it wouldn’t happen this early, but we felt like there was a good chance we were going to have to dip into the depth at some point.”
And just because it’s the Mets, with everything viewed through a financial prism, they currently have $113.6 million worth of starters (in ’23 salary) unavailable to take the mound. The present-day cost of their active rotation? That’s a whopping $18.4 million for the complete set of all five, with only two — Kodai Senga ($15M) and Joey Lucchesi (1.15M) making seven figures.
Kind of a shocking development, and certainly not what Steve Cohen had in mind by investing $375 million in this year’s roster, one that was supposed to be a World Series favorite out of the gate. But if you look big picture, it’s not quite as discouraging as you might initially think.
Quintana’s absence, the result of surgery for a rib fracture, is the only one that is expected to stretch into June and perhaps beyond. Scherzer comes off his suspension on May 1 — just in time to pitch Monday’s series finale against Atlanta at Citi — and can probably benefit from the unanticipated break to limit his long-term stress, especially as it pertains to his persistent back/side issues.
And then there is Verlander, who said Tuesday that he remains on target to make his season debut next month at Detroit (May 2-4). Obviously, the Mets having to wait more than a month to deploy the newer of their $43 million starters is not ideal, but better late than never. And if Verlander’s shoulder-muscle strain is actually fixed for the long haul, shortening the season for a 40-year-old maybe isn’t the worst thing.
“It definitely is frustrating,” Verlander said. “You see guys going out and stretching themselves a little bit. It’s hard for me not to be a part of and not want to help in some way, shape or form. But everybody behind the scenes is saying just wait, your time will be here. It’s still early. Let’s not overdo it now.”
The Mets had managed OK without him, or the others for that matter. Entering Tuesday, the Mets were 14-9 and trailed first-place Atlanta by a game in the NL East. That’s a fairly remarkable stat with Showalter’s patchwork rotation treading water this month, but the Mets can’t push their luck indefinitely either.
The rotation’s 4.90 ERA ranked 21st in the majors after Butto’s performance and is averaging roughly five innings per start — not what the Mets drew up for their 2023 blueprint. And it would be unrealistic to think Lucchesi is going to repeat what he did to the Giants at Oracle Park last Friday (7 scoreless innings, 9 Ks) — even against the lowly Nationals, whose 18.3% strikeout rate is the lowest in the majors (the Mets are next at 18.7%).
We’ll see what Lucchesi can do for an encore in Thursday’s series finale, but he’s an insurance policy, best put behind the glass again for the next crisis. The Mets need to get what they paid for this season, and that starts with the imminent returns of Scherzer and Verlander in the coming weeks. Once that happens, the rotation will be viewed as a strength again rather than a Wordle puzzle to be solved each morning.
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.
