Harvey nixes offer to skip start: 'I'm not a quitter'
After allowing a career-high nine runs in the shortest outing of his career Thursday, when he was serenaded by boos from home fans as he limped off the field, New York Mets right-hander Matt Harvey was given the option of skipping his next start.
No way, he said.
"Obviously it's frustrating being out there right now when you're not doing well and not helping the team," Harvey told ESPN's Adam Rubin on Monday. "As a teammate, your objective is to do everything you can to win games and help us succeed. And I wasn't doing that. So, obviously, they gave me an option to be skipped or whatnot and really try to figure things out. For me, taking time off isn't going to do anything. It's finding it on the mound.
"I'm not a quitter. I'm not going to just quit and put the ball down. It's a fight. It was good for me to do that."
Unwilling to concede, the beleaguered 27-year-old will try to get things back on track Tuesday in Washington against the team that pummeled him five nights ago, inflating his ERA to 5.77 - the eighth-worst among qualified starters - through nine starts in 2016.
"Nobody is more frustrated than him," manager Terry Collins said. "He said, 'I'm not backing away from this.' A lot of guys would have taken that out. He had a shot to. He could have said, 'I need to get away from this.' But he didn't. He just said, 'I've got to get back out there and I've got to pitch. That's the only way I'm going to get through this.' I thought that was the most impressive part of it."
Determined to break out of his funk, Harvey deviated from his usual between-starts routine, throwing on the main mound Saturday at Citi Field to enable team officials to use their TrackMan system to examine his mechanics - which, by his own estimation, are off.
"I think it does release point, it does arm slot, it does angle," Harvey said about the tracking system. "It does all that stuff. For me it was good that once I started feeling like I was throwing the ball correctly and comfortably, it was all the same. I think in my last 20 pitches I had a very consistent arm slot."
On Tuesday, the former All-Star - who, some have speculated, is suffering from an arm hangover after throwing 216 innings last year in his first season back from Tommy John surgery - will try to replicate those mechanical adjustments in his second straight matchup against Stephen Strasburg, another Tommy John guy (who, as agent Scott Boras noted last week, struggled for the first two months of 2015 before turning it around).
Related: Boras: Worried about Harvey? Look at Strasburg
"I understand and I know how poorly I'm doing. It's not even a comparison to anybody else," Harvey said. "It's a feeling that I don't have of throwing the ball correctly. It's kind of a weird funk. It's frustrating when you're going out there and I don't feel like I'm throwing the ball the way I'm supposed to and I'm getting knocked around. It's an unsettling feeling."