Carlos Mendoza, the new Mets manager, sat next to Aaron Boone for four years in the other baseball borough of New York City, a place where the Yankees — once famous for changing managers — hardly ever do it now.
MIAMI — Prior to Christian Scott’s third Major League start, manager Carlos Mendoza laid out the keys to a successful outing: Stay on the attack and be aggressive (especially with the fastball).
But what happens when a well-laid-out strategy doesn’t go according to plan?
That was what Scott — taking the mound at loanDepot park, less than an hour from his hometown of Coconut Creek, Fla. — faced in the Mets’ series-opening 8-0 loss to the Marlins on Friday night.
New York’s No. 5 prospect entered the outing riding a wave of two quality starts to open his big league experience. Then, he was hit with what amounted to a cold, cold shower.
After a quick first inning, Scott — who relies on a four-seam fastball (45.4%) and three off-speed pitches: a slider (23.2%), a sweeper (20.5%) and a split-finger changeup (10.8%) — started to stumble.
The righty didn’t have a feel for his fastball, so he leaned more heavily on his slider; he threw the pitch 13 times in a 26-pitch second inning — of those 13 sliders, the Marlins made contact (fouls or hits) on six pitches, and five were out of the zone. The missed execution and alterations in pitch sequencing caught up to him.
Scott eventually got back to using his fastball, but not before the Marlins made him pay. Miami backstop Nick Fortes crushed a three-run homer off a sweeper, which Mendoza said was a hanging slider, to put the Mets into a 4-0 hole. It was just the second home run Scott has given up in his three starts.
“I just don’t think I did a good job executing in-zone,” Scott said. “Definitely had some hittable pitches there in the second, they were able to string a couple hits together. Definitely a bad pitch there for the homer, [I] hung the slider there. I need to do a better job executing in-zone, especially deeper in counts — the more pitches that they see — and do a better job at getting those sliders down and making quality pitches there.”
“He wasn’t at his best, obviously,” Mendoza said. “I thought he got away from his fastball, especially in that second inning, against left-handed hitters. You know, [Nick] Gordon got him on the slider. [Vidal Brujan] got him on a slider. … It was one of those where he got away from his fastball, maybe a little bit [away from his] pitch sequence there. The changeup, he didn’t use it against lefties — the changeup-split — and they made him pay.”
But rather than feel demoralized, Scott continued to battle, adjust and evolve.
Losing his fastball wasn’t ideal, nor was having to use his slider more than typical. After all, the slider is one of the keys to Scott’s arsenal — he needs it to offset the four-seamer, which has a 37% whiff rate.
In his first two starts, Scott induced a combined 33 swings-and-misses (18 and 15, respectively). On Friday night, he got the Marlins — who entered the day with the highest swing rate in the Majors (51.4%) — to whiff just nine times.
Scott did not back down, though. His ability to maintain his composure while facing his first big bout of adversity is a rather telling example of the poise that Mendoza has repeatedly lauded.
Miami continued to get hits off Scott, but he responded in kind. When the Marlins put a pair in scoring position in the third inning, Scott escaped the jam without allowing a run. He did the same in the fourth inning, when he loaded the bases with no outs, retiring three in a row with a swinging strikeout, a flyout and a fielder’s choice to strand the bases loaded.
The composure required to work through a bases-loaded, no-outs jam spoke volumes.
“He’s not gonna give up,” Mendoza said. “This is a guy that is going to continue to compete, continue to give you his best — and he did that today. Even when he’s not feeling [his pitches] and it’s a battle for him, for him to get out of that bases-loaded jam — it says a lot about who he is, you know? On a night where he didn’t have it, he continued to compete
Though the performance (four runs on seven hits, a walk and a hit-by-pitch over four innings) wasn’t ideal for Scott’s proto-hometown debut, it was an important learning experience and yet another lesson in managing misfortune on the mound.
“[I’ll] learn from it, put one foot in front of the other, and come back to work tomorrow,” Scott said.
