It's going to be a while before we really know for sure. But for now, one thing at least appears to be true: Matt Harvey is back.
The New York Mets' fireballing right-hander didn't pitch at all in 2014, of course. Harvey missed the year recovering from a Tommy John operation that he underwent in 2013. That cut short a season in which he seemed destined to win the National League Cy Young, as he boasted a sparkling 2.27 ERA and 6.2 strikeout-to-walk ratio through 26 starts.
Hence the considerable amount of anticipation surrounding Harvey's long-awaited spring debut on Friday afternoon against the Detroit Tigers. It was to be the first #HarveyDay since August 2013.
And yes, it lived up to the hype—and then some.
Harvey only pitched two innings on Friday, but they were two perfect innings. He broke a couple of bats and struck out three batters to record his six outs, and he needed only 25 pitches to do so.
Granted, Harvey didn't exactly face Detroit's best lineup. Miguel Cabrera and Victor Martinez are out with injuries, and the Tigers didn't start Ian Kinsler, Yoenis Cespedes or J.D. Martinez.
But even if the Tigers had started their best lineup, it might still have been overmatched. What's important is how Harvey looked, and the short answer is that he looked an awful lot like Matt Harvey.
If there was a big question heading into Harvey's spring debut, it was whether he would exhibit the arsenal of power stuff that allowed him to mow through hitters in 2013—unless you had asked the Mets, who were more concerned that Harvey would be too focused on showing he still had power stuff.
"That he focuses on the process and not the result," Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen told Mike Puma of the New York Post when asked what he wanted to see. "That he doesn't see 97 or 98 [mph] and stays with his delivery and gets his foot down and throws the baseball the way he's been throwing it throughout his whole rehab."
As it turned out, Harvey showed the best of both worlds.
He certainly had no trouble showing off his best velocity. His first pitch was a 96 mph fastball to Anthony Gose, and he got him swinging on a 98 mph heater just a few pitches later. By the second inning, Harvey's velocity was up to 99 mph.
His fastball location, meanwhile, was generally good.
The first fastball Harvey threw Gose was nowhere close to the strike zone, but that was about as wild as he got with his fastball command. Though there were instances here and there where he missed his spots, his misses adhered pretty well to the strike zone. He also threw quite a few on the borders of the zone, including the aforementioned 98 mph heater that he blew past Gose.
Courtesy of MLB's Twitter feed, it looked like this:
Aside from his power fastball, Harvey also showed that he could still run his slider up around 90 mph and that his changeup still had good late movement even in the upper 80s.
The real star of the show, however, was his curveball.
According to FanGraphs, Harvey threw his curveball 13.4 percent of the time in 2013. But it's possible that a lot of those were misclassified sliders, as Harvey himself says his curveball is something new.
"I always threw sliders and I don't know where this curveball came from, so it's nice having that develop," Harvey said after his mound session on Monday, via Puma. "I don't know if I figured out something in my mechanics or it just magically appeared, but it's nice having that and it felt good out there."
New? Rediscovered? Remodeled?
Whatever you want to call it, Harvey wasn't shy about breaking out his curveball on Friday. He drew an awkward whiff from Gose with it on only his third pitch and threw maybe a half-dozen more throughout his outing. They sat around 83-84 mph, and no Tigers hitter really knew what to do with it—especially not Bryan Holaday.
Holaday saw two curveballs from Harvey in his at-bat in the second inning. He swung weakly through the first and watched the second catch the bottom of the zone for a called third strike.
Courtesy of David Shemie, it looked like this:
As Owen Watson argued at FanGraphs, the prospect of Harvey now having a plus curveball is a frightening one. It was the one pitch of his that didn't really blow away the eye test before. If it starts doing so now, he'll be a rare pitcher with four legit plus pitches in his repertoire.
Mind you, Harvey's day at the office wasn't quite as perfect as his line score. According to Marc Carig of Newsday, the man himself wasn't happy with a couple of the sliders he threw and felt he could have done a better job of pitching inside.
Overall, though, Harvey was willing to deem his afternoon a success, telling Puma:
It's at this point that we must note that all the usual caveats apply.
We're only talking about one spring training start—one that lasted only two innings to boot. And, again, Harvey wasn't facing Detroit's "Murderers' Row" lineup. Friday's performance is hardly a guarantee of future dominance to come.
That said, it works pretty darn well as a promise. Based on what we know so far, Harvey still has an extremely powerful arm, a good idea of where he's throwing the ball and a shiny new curveball that looks very much like it belongs in his arsenal.
When Harvey was pitching in 2013, he was arguably baseball's most dominant pitcher. From what we've seen so far, you can't help but think he might be right there again in 2015.
Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference unless otherwise noted/linked.
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