Meet the Mets: The unknown pitchers in New York's rotation

Could be a baseball season. Could be triage.

Could be the usual – the most runs win, the fewest allowed win. Or, could be the reality – sturdiest UCL/oblique/rotator cuff/finger pad wins.

Maybe it’ll be the Cubs, no matter what.

A writer recently pondered whether the five young Mets starters – presumably Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom, Steven Matz and Zack Wheeler, the erstwhile future of the organization – ever would be healthy enough, productive enough and happy enough (but mostly healthy enough) to become the dominant unit that has been foretold. To which we’d respond, pick five starting pitchers league-wide, any five, and how many of those will be healthy enough, productive enough and happy enough over the next two or three seasons?

The pitcher’s world is a bit fragile beyond his next pitch. If it’s not the elbow or the shoulder or some other part, it’s the stealth comebacker, or the fastball that dies without cause, or the luck that plain runs out, and then what?

Well, if you’re the Mets and you’re in the wild-card fight of your lives and there’s only a few weeks left and Harvey, deGrom and Matz aren’t available, and Wheeler never has been, then you reach back to 2011 and you keep sending guys out there and hoping for the best.

That’s where men such as Rafael Montero, Robert Gsellman and Seth Lugo start showing up, men known to former scouting and farm director Paul DePodesta and minor-league pitching coordinator Ron Romanick and Triple-A pitching coach Frank Viola, men who are starting pitchers for the Mets during the wild-card fight of their lives. Men who are not Harvey or deGrom or Matz, not yet, probably not ever.

So, five summers ago, the three were first-year Mets, and this is the randomness/intrigue/hunch/payoff of scouting and developing. This is where Montero is signed (for $90,000) out of the Dominican Republic as a 20-year-old in January 2011, and Gsellman is drafted out of Westchester High in L.A. in the 13th round of ’11, and Lugo is taken 21 rounds later out of Centenary College of Louisiana. And where, five years later, Montero starts two games the Mets win in late August and early September, and Gsellman beats the Nationals on Saturday, and Lugo is 3-1, having beaten the Cardinals, Marlins and Nationals over four starts.

They are the stories of fall, of an all-hands-on-deck month, of next-man-up trials and must-have games. So, yeah, maybe nobody planned on this, maybe nobody ever wanted to see it. But, sometimes, you gotta bandage ’em up and send ’em out and let the best UCL win.

A WEEK BEHIND:

Sitting Tuesday night in the Dodger Stadium press box, watching Shelby Miller hit bat barrel after bat barrel, reading about Dansby Swanson’s first big-league home run, wondering what would be left of the Diamondbacks’ front office and coaching staff come October.

The five home runs hit against Zack Greinke the night before remained a fresh topic, along with the 4.54 season-long ERA that came along with them, one of what must be a thousand regrets for an organization playing out another lost year.

This is the fifth consecutive season the Diamondbacks will be dark in October, a wobbly run whose course has not changed under Tony La Russa and Dave Stewart, and now it’s hard to find someone who believes manager Chip Hale will be asked back, and only slightly easier to find someone who’d give Hale’s immediate bosses a better-than-even shot at returning.

It can be a crummy game, starting with A.J. Pollock’s injury, continuing through the atrocious luck that is an average Greinke and a disastrous Miller, among other disasters, ending in whatever comes of that.

But, at this point, the D-backs probably deserve whatever they have coming.

A WEEK AHEAD:

The second week of September opens and here we go. Twenty-ish games remain, an eighth of the season, and at least one from among the Toronto Blue Jays, Boston Red Sox, Baltimore Orioles and Detroit Tigers is preparing to go home, unless two of those teams catch the Cleveland Indians, which seems unlikely.

We start in Toronto. The Red Sox arrive Friday. The Blue Jays have won seven of 13 games in the series and both teams have scored 62 runs.

The probable matchups:

Friday: Rick Porcello vs. Marco Estrada

Saturday: Eduardo Rodriguez vs. J.A. Happ

Sunday: Drew Pomeranz vs. R.A. Dickey

The Red Sox return to Boston on Sunday night. On Monday, they open a three-game series against the Orioles, who, turns out, have quite a week ahead of them as well, starting Friday against the Tigers.

The probables:

Friday: Kevin Gausman vs. Michael Fulmer.

Saturday: Wade Miley vs. Jordan Zimmermann.

Sunday: Chris Tillman vs. Daniel Norris.

And, here’s next week’s series, Orioles at Red Sox, who have split 12 games:

Monday: Yovani Gallardo vs. Steven Wright.

Tuesday: Dylan Bundy vs. David Price.

Wednesday: Kevin Gausman vs. Porcello.

SAW IT COMING:

I don’t know about him getting too little love, or just enough considering that mostly Quadruple-A team around him, but the man is a WAR machine, and statistics are just that, and none of it really defines the five years Mike Trout has laid on a sport that isn’t that easy.

The game finds him. He finds the game. It’s wispy, and undeniable. Either way, you’ve seen the great high school player amid a bunch of guys killing time on a baseball field, getting their college applications done and scraping together enough gas money for a trip to the mall. You’ve seen college players who spend a season on the barrels of their bats, who are just better, and it’s like the game knows it and so keeps checking in on them, circling back – here, it’s yours to win or lose.

I wish you could’ve seen Bryce Harper in junior college, the way his at-bats, his glove, his baserunning, ran through a game like a heartbeat. Baseball doesn’t have a point guard, a quarterback, nothing like that. Sure, a pitcher has the ball in his hand, but then it’s gone, and when his turn is done he sits on the bench and watches everybody else hit.

The closest the game at this level gets is a player such as Mike Trout, whose numbers are ridiculous and yet hardly match his relentlessness. In the trying climate of an irrelevant team that is – again – in transition, Trout shows up every night, every game, every inning, every at-bat, every hump down the first-base line, as if the game has invited him in.

He’s not alone in that, necessarily. He’s just better at it.

DIDN’T SEE IT COMING:

We’d almost given up hope on the annual Justin Upton numbers rush, where, in spite of all every-day and eye-ball evidence, by year’s end you may only scratch your head and muse, “Well, I guess he was OK.”

But, here he comes. Again. Seven months after he pulled that $132.75 million contract, Upton has mostly been a below-average player. Factor in the money, and his first year in Detroit has been a .239-batting, .296-base-reaching, .423-slugging disaster. His negative-0.4 WAR is last among qualified left fielders. Goes for both sides of the ball, too. Minimum 600 innings in left field, Fangraphs’ numbers rate no one worse.

The Tigers managed to play around Upton’s at-bats for most of the season (not easy when he’s also barreling toward a career high in strikeouts), thanks to what otherwise is a wholly acceptable offense.

OK, all that said, there’s always today, and there’s always September, and Upton might actually have something to contribute. Since Aug. 20, he’s batted .333 and OPSed 1.203 with eight homers and 21 RBI in 16 games. The Tigers won 11 of those games.

He keeps on like this, and the Tigers make something of it, maybe by month’s end you’ll have to shrug and say, “Well, hmmm, I guess.”