BALTIMORE — For much of the last month, the Mets have been a sailor frantically plugging leaks, concocting a solution to one just in time to move on to the next.
The past week seemingly brought calm. After making nine roster moves in the final week of May, New York hadn’t made one in seven days. Its everyday lineup was looking more stable, and there was good news concerning players on the horizon in Luis Guillorme, Jeff McNeil and Michael Conforto.
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And then a new leak burst in the starting rotation.
David Peterson was hit hard for a second consecutive start, failing to finish the third in a 10-3 blowout loss to Baltimore. The left-hander got eight outs and allowed eight hits, five of them for extra bases. He was tagged for four runs in 2 2/3 innings.
Peterson’s ERA in his sophom*ore season is 6.32. He’s allowed 15 earned runs in his last 13 2/3 innings over four starts, and he’s recorded just nine outs in his last two.
The frustration for Peterson on Tuesday was with his inconsistency. In between the extra-base hits, he executed pitches and sequences that seemed critical at the time — a fastball at 96 to jam Freddy Galvis for the last out of the first, consecutive strikeouts of Trey Mancini and Anthony Santander to strand a runner in the second, and a sharp slider to get Maikel Franco with a runner on third and one out in the third.
Of course, given the aggregate, those moments felt like the public course’s weekend duffer telling you about the green in regulation he hit on 8, just before the four-putt.
Peterson has battled his command since the midway point of last season. Sometimes that means more free passes than the lefty was accustomed to issuing in the minors and added traffic on the bases. Sometimes it means too many pitches missing middle, the way it did Tuesday.
His slider, a linchpin for him during his rookie season, has been his most maddening pitch in 2021. Before the game, manager Luis Rojas theorized that Peterson’s offseason and spring training emphasis on his changeup and developing curveball may have gotten him out of sync with his slider.
A season ago, opponents hit .121 and slugged .259 on Peterson’s slider. This year, they’re hitting .315 and slugging .650 on it.
“He had a good fastball, but the secondary stuff is still inconsistent right now,” Rojas said postgame. “He’s just missing spots.”
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Last year, Peterson was at his best in big spots, holding opposing hitters to a .195 average and .600 OPS with runners on base. This year, they’re hitting .311 off him in the stretch with a .956 OPS.
At the same time, perhaps dividing Peterson’s results between his two seasons creates a larger distinction than necessary. Last year wasn’t a full rookie year for him, and this year is bringing regression that was largely foreseeable after a nice run of 10 outings. He outperformed his FIP last year, with a good strand rate and low BABIP; he’s underperforming it this year with a bad strand rate and a high BABIP.
It’s seemed to even out: For his career, Peterson is 7-7 (and the Mets 10-10 in his starts) with a 4.84 ERA and 4.76 FIP over 96 2/3 innings.
Through his first 11 months as a major-leaguer, Peterson has been characterized by his poise and unflappability, both held in precocious supply for a 25-year-old who’s still never pitched a game at Triple A. Until this point, he’d rebounded from his bad starts with good ones, the way he did against the Phillies and Rays earlier this season.
A second straight rough outing didn’t appear to faze him Tuesday, and Rojas said he’d make his next start for the Mets, slated to be next Monday against the Cubs.
“We’re just going through a rough patch here,” said Peterson afterward. “All I can keep doing is showing up and working hard and trying to put this on the straight and narrow.”
We’ve written before about the challenges the Mets will confront thanks to their condensed schedule in the second half of this month. Starting this Friday, they will play 33 games in the 31 days left until the All-Star break. They have a run of nine games in seven days against division rivals a week later. They will need all the pitching they can get.
The Mets entered this season hoping that, by now, they wouldn’t have to lean on Peterson as a regular member of the rotation. But with Carlos Carrasco and Noah Syndergaard still beyond the horizon, the lefty remains vital.
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“We need to get him right,” Rojas said. “We need David Peterson. He’s going to be a big piece to get through (the June schedule).”
There aren’t many good alternatives to Peterson’s spot in the rotation at the moment, and those ones will be needed soon enough anyway. Thomas Szapucki has a 2.05 ERA for Syracuse over five outings, but he’s gotten one out past the fifth inning this season. He probably can’t be counted on too much for length.
Franklyn Kilome and Jerad Eickhoff are other Syracuse starters; each would need to be added to the 40-man roster.
The Mets could also go back to the quantity approach they used earlier in the season, with long men such as Robert Gsellman and Sean Reid-Foley eating innings. Gsellman, however, allowed four runs while recording one fewer out than Peterson on Tuesday, and Reid-Foley danced through traffic in his last couple of big-league outings before being sent down recently.
Rojas is right: The Mets don’t really have a choice with Peterson. They have to get him right.
“Right now it’s on us and him to get back on track,” Rojas said. “The poise is there. The stuff is there. He just needs the command.”
(Photo of Tomas Nido and David Peterson: Elsa / Getty Images)
Tim Britton is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the New York Mets. He has covered Major League Baseball since 2009 and the Mets since 2018. Prior to joining The Athletic, he spent seven seasons on the Red Sox beat for the Providence Journal. He has also contributed to Baseball Prospectus, NBC Sports Boston, MLB.com and Yahoo Sports. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBritton
