The Dark Knight Has Fallen: The Decline Of Matt Harvey

Do you miss Matt Harvey yet? I do.

 

It’s not like he’s gone from the Earth. When the Mets finally cut bait on Harvey after the long, painful decline from his peak form in the early 2010s, it took less than a week for another team to scoop him up off the scrap heap via a minor trade—on Friday, Harvey took the mound for the first time in the uniform of the Cincinnati Reds (and boy, did that look weird). It’s hardly surprising that he was able to find a new home so quickly—even given his recent struggles, there will always be teams out there willing to take a flier on a 29-year old pitcher with a 6-WAR season under his belt. Name recognition alone should keep Harvey gainfully employed in the majors for years to come.

 

But the real Matt Harvey—the Dark Knight, the savior of one of MLB’s most depressing franchises and the most exciting Mets pitcher since Doc Gooden—has been AWOL for a long time now, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to believe that he might ever come back. The Tommy John surgery that cost him his 2014 campaign, followed by a battle with thoracic outlet syndrome in 2016 (you have to feel for Harvey a little, considering he suffered through the two most debilitating maladies a pitcher can face within a couple years of each other), have sapped some of the zap out of Harvey’s right arm; a fastball that sat at 97 mph during his peak season in 2013 has averaged just 93.3 this year. Those few miles per hour of velocity make a big difference, especially for a guy whose killing blow is an 89 mile-per-hour slider—without the drastic drop-off in velocity from his heater, his off-speed stuff doesn’t generate the same sinking missed-a-step-on-the-stairs feeling in a hitter’s stomach. The difference is showing through in small ways.

 

At his peak, Harvey got hitters to swing at over 35% of pitches that he threw outside the strike zone and got swing-and-miss strikes on over 12% of his pitches; in the last few years those numbers have cratered (down to 21.6% and 7.7% in 2018, respectively), and his hard-hit ball percentage has risen every year since 2015. Those subtle differences in performance, in turn, have led to some more noticeable ones: the pitcher who generated 10.2 bWAR between 2013 and 2015 (while missing a full season in 2014 due to Tommy John) has been a negative-value player in the years since then, posting a cumulative -1.2 WAR since 2016. In his first three seasons, Harvey never posted an ERA+ below 140; it dipped down to 83 in 2016, then 63 in 2017, and doesn’t look to be trending upwards in 2018.  Any way you measure it, the Harvey of 2018 bears scant resemblance to the one who took the league by storm just five years ago. In so many words: Matt Harvey is washed. The Dark Knight has fallen.

 

It seems crazy to think that, at age 29, an elite pitcher’s peak could already be in the rearview mirror. I mean, this is the Dark Knight we’re talking about! He almost single-handedly revitalized a moribund, listless franchise. Every start he made at Citi Field became a citywide attraction. In 2013, his first full season in the majors, he led all qualified pitchers with a 2.01 FIP, struck out 6.16 batters for every walk he issued, and posted an ERA+ of 157, good for the fourth best mark in the league (trailing Clayton Kershaw, Jose Fernandez, and, surprisingly, Anibal Sanchez). FanGraphs’ version of WAR has him worth 6.5 wins in that season alone, while Baseball Reference pegs him at 5.4; again, that was his first full season. In his youth, the matter of Harvey assuming the mantle of Best Pitcher Alive seemed more a question of when than if. In my lifetime, I have seen few pitchers who have demanded my attention every time they took the mound the way Harvey did. I happened to be in front of the TV for his eye-popping, 11-strikeout major league debut against Arizona in 2012, and it was one of the most riveting pitching performances I have ever watched:

 

 

Even in the days before his changeup had really developed, Harvey’s arsenal of pitches was spectacular and virtually unhittable—a runaway-train heater that he liked to pound right into the heart of the zone between the hitter’s belt and the letters on his jersey, backed up by a devastating late-breaking slider that looked like it would float right over the middle of the plate before diving sharply into the dirt like a downed airplane, evaporating to the outside corner against righties and biting viciously at the ankles of lefties. And when the changeup came along to round out his repertoire, it just seemed unfair:

 

 

Harvey in those days was a force of nature, and a godsend for a Mets franchise that had gone years without anything to get excited about. Every batter he faced was must-see theater, and his home starts became something like a holiday in Queens, as Mets fans turned out in force to marvel at the spectacle of the Dark Knight.

 

(One brief, totally irrelevant sidenote: while that is a fantastic nickname, can we at least acknowledge that it doesn’t make any sense at all? It’s ostensibly a reference to Harvey Dent, except Batman is the Dark Knight, not Harvey Dent. His name reminded people of a movie character, so they started referring to him as…a different movie character. This would be like calling Jeff Kent ‘Lex Luthor’ because he had the same last name as Superman. This has always bothered me way more than it should.)

 

And when Harvey developed an off-field reputation for boisterous nightlife debauchery, that only seemed to enhance his image on the mound: he spent his work days flirting with no-hitters and his nights flirting with supermodels. His party-boy image curtailed perfectly with the lazy arrogance of his on-field demeanor and the way he barely seemed to exert any effort in flicking 97-mph fastballs out of his hand. Some great pitchers make their dominance look like hard work (Clayton Kershaw, for example, looks like his eyes are about to pop out of his skull every time he delivers), but Harvey conveyed the exact opposite: on the field he exhibited both pride and contempt, as if a bad outing was not just undesirable but actually beneath his dignity.

 

And then came Game 5 of the 2015 World Series. The Mets were down three games to one against the Kansas City Royals; Harvey was coming off a season in which he had returned from the Tommy John surgery that cost him his 2014 season to rack up 188 strikeouts, a 140 ERA+ and 4.8 bWAR. It seemed like the moment that Harvey had been destined for ever since he burst onto the scene in 2012—the Golden-Armed franchise savior taking the mound in the most important Mets game in 29 years.Through eight innings, the story seemed to be writing itself, as Harvey notched nine strikeouts and kept the Royals off the scoreboard. When Harvey returned to the Mets’ dugout in the middle of the eighth inning, with a 2-0 lead and over 100 pitches under his belt, pitching coach Dan Warthen approached him to let him know that the Mets would be calling on closer Jeurys Familia in the ninth inning. “No way,” Harvey responded with an emphatic shake of his head…and then he walked the length of the bench to tell manager Terry Collins the same thing. “No way are you taking me out of this game.” This was Harvey at his most, well, Harvey-esque: the proud warrior, the relentless bulldog. Like Jack Morris in 1991, he wanted the ball, and he wanted the glory for himself.

 

You know what happened next. Lorenzo Cain drew a leadoff walk, and Eric Hosmer doubled him home to put the tying run in scoring position. That was the end of Harvey’s night, but he had already sowed the seeds of the Mets’ collapse: two batters later, with Familia in the game, Salvador Perez grounded out to third, Hosmer made one of the most daring baserunning decisions in World Series history, and the Mets’ last lead of the World Series was gone. The Royals would produce a five-run twelfth inning to clinch the game and the championship; since that night, the Mets have appeared in just a single playoff game, and Harvey has been a negative-value pitcher.

 

It would be empirically silly to suggest that Harvey’s decline was triggered by his crunchtime hubris and the debacle that ensued—clearly, his struggles have more to do with the one-two punch of Tommy John surgery and thoracic outlet syndrome weakening his once-powerful right arm. But in charting the subsequent downward trajectories of both Harvey and the Mets as a whole, that fateful Game 5 looms as the obvious turning point, the moment when the Dark Knight’s veneer of invincibility was shattered and the narrative of the franchise was flipped on its head. Before that game, the Mets had the look of an ascendant powerhouse, led by an impressive stockpile of young pitching talent. With their core five of Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Jacob DeGrom, Zack Wheeler and Steven Matz, New York’s rotation seemed set to dominate for years to come; instead, that group has followed the same disappointing path as previous generations of promising Mets pitchers, from Doc Gooden to Generation K.

 

Harvey has flamed out spectacularly, Matz and Wheeler have never developed into the dependable big league starters they were expected to be, and all five have had their development repeatedly derailed by injuries. One by one, the Mets’ supposed superheroes have been exposed as mortal. (One more tangent about nicknames: how come DeGrom never got a superhero nickname? Matt Harvey is “The Dark Knight”, Noah Syndergaard is “Thor”, and Jacob DeGrom is…just a guy named Jacob. That seems kind of unfair. On the other hand, DeGrom has enjoyed by far the most consistent success of the trio, so maybe he dodged some sort of superhero curse. OK, I swear I’m done ranting about nicknames now.)

 

It might be too soon to write a eulogy for Harvey—there’s still a chance the Dark Knight will rise again. Think about Justin Verlander, who was the best pitcher in baseball in 2011 and 2012, then declined precipitously to near-replacement level in 2014 before bouncing back to a level of dominance not far off from his peak years in 2016 and 2017. It’s not a perfect comparison—Verlander’s blue period didn’t last nearly as long, and his performance didn’t sink nearly as low, as Harvey’s, and it wasn’t brought on by arm injuries—but it at least shows that there is precedent for a once-great pitcher recapturing the magic in his 30s. It’s also possible that Harvey could have a second act in store as a shutdown relief pitcher, a la Tim Lincecum. But for now, we are left with a sad sight indeed: a desiccated, diminished Harvey laboring to recreate a version of himself that no longer exists. In the end, the player who was supposed to turn the Mets around has become just another in a long line of failed phenoms from Dwight Gooden to Bill Pulsipher, doomed to play out the string chasing the ghost of the career he was supposed to have.