Monday Night Baseball IGT: New York (N) @ Phila.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I'm just having fun with the whole Harvey-is-a-Douche thing. I am thrilled that he's been so great and want nothing more than to see it continue. I mean, he IS a douche, but shirley not too douchy to root for.

[metirish]

Yeah , I think this stemed from Matt's twitter feed

specifically the pic of the Escalade

[Ceetar]

btw, Apparently Adam Rubin has been just randomly tweeting lists of players who played for "Mets and OPPONENT" lately. I can't imagine he's doing anything but reading directly from the Ultimate Mets Database.

[Edgy MD]

Or here.

[Gwreck]

Keith Law offers an evaluation that is very encouraging to my eyes:

Harvey has room to improve Matt Harvey faced off against a desiccated facsimile of Roy Halladay -- the less said about him, the better -- on Monday night and put up an outstanding stat line, showing great stuff but struggling a lot with location, control and even consistency on his curve and slider. The good stuff first: That's ace stuff, a fastball mostly 93-97, a filthy slider at 87-91, a hard curveball at 78-83 and a riding change at 85-88. He punched out Ryan Howard by going up and in with heat three times in four pitches; Howard eventually caved and chased a pitch he couldn't sniff. Laynce Nix, not really a major league hitter anyway, couldn't touch Harvey's fastball and swung through three of them in his last at-bat, the final one perfectly placed up out of his reach but close enough to induce him to flail at it. Harvey threw some sliders that were unhittable, right off the outside corner to right-handed hitters, victimizing Michael Young more than once that way. The slider he threw to strike out Young in the fourth, 90 mph on the TV gun, broke down over the outside corner of the plate and made Young look feeble. He could have used the changeup more, preferring to go in with the curveball to left-handed hitters, even though his changeup is an above-average (or better) pitch. Philly's lineup just isn't very good anymore, which helped Harvey get away with a lot of pitches where he either didn't locate or didn't finish a breaking ball (mostly the curve). The sac fly Howard hit in the fourth came off a bad changeup that a decent left-handed hitter would have destroyed. Harvey hung several sliders and curveballs, including ones that Humberto Quintero and Young failed to capitalize on, with the curve the bigger problem on Monday. Harvey also missed up in or above the zone way too often for my tastes. He did blow it by a number of hitters, which is great when the location is planned, but when you miss, it's much better to miss down in the zone than it is to miss up. Quintero also got a fastball up in the first pitch of his second at-bat that might as well have been on a tee, a mistake Harvey will pay for if he does it against better hitters. He didn't get a ton of help from his defense. Ike Davis was an adventure at first base all night, and Kirk Nieuwenhuis struggled picking up some balls in center. It also seemed like John Buck struggled to catch Harvey's better velocity, jerking some borderline pitches away from the zone. Overall, I'm still as bullish on Harvey as I was when I scouted his major league debut in July, but there is a gap between that ace potential and what he showed Monday night in both command and in consistency on the two breaking balls.