Game #66 Preview: Blue Jays @ Mets

The Blue Jays have lost one in a row and the season once again looks doomed. What a difference one inning can make! To make matters worse, the boys in blue have to face off against the Dark Knight in Matt Harvey tonight while they counter with....Scott Copeland! If you want to look on the bright side of things, Harvey has had a horrid last few starts by his standards while Copeland's first career start in front of about 40,000 screaming high-pitched awful sounding school children was excellent by anyone's standards.

The righty Harvey, who missed all of 2014 recovering from Tommy John surgery, had a 1.98 ERA entering his May 23rd start against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Four starts later and the phenom's number now sits at 3.62 thanks to some outings where he allowed seven runs while getting homers hit left and right against him. In his first eight starts this year, Harvey surrendered four home runs, while those four most recent starts saw him allow eight over the fences!

Despite these struggles, Harvey is still as filthy as any pitcher in the league and has no-hit potential every time he takes the mound. His repertoire features a fastball in the high 90's along with a hard change (starting to sound similar to last night?), a slider, and a nasty curveball. His fastball and curveball are his best pitches by pitch value, just like Noah Syndergaard, with hitters who are finally able to catch up to his heater then being hit with his knee-buckling curve. This season his slider is his best swing and miss pitch and could easily be interchanged with the curveball as his best off-speed pitch on any given night.

Drool:

via FanGraphs

The key for the Jays right-handed power hitters will be able to lay off his breaking stuff as it's usually out of the zone. If they can sit on the fastball in the strike zone then they will be able to use Harvey's velocity against him to hit the ball hard, similar to what Jose Bautista did last night against Syndergaard.

Hopeful Lineup

1. Jose Reyes SS
2. Josh Donaldson 3B
3. Jose Bautista RF
4. Edwin Encarnacion 1B
5. Russell Martin C
6. Chris Colabello LF
7. Kevin Pillar CF
8. Ryan Goins 2B (finally accepted it I suppose)
9. Scott Copeland P

Bullpen Usage

Find the Link

Find the link between Matt Harvey and this man.

My attention was taken up just slightly by a rather important hockey game last night, so hopefully today's game is equally as good of a pitcher's duel.