With thin starting rotation, David Peterson has become a problem for Mets

The good news for the Mets is they look very much like the best of their 2022 team on this 7-2 road trip, putting the ball in play with hard contact, pouncing on opponents’ mistakes, and flashing some excellent defense.

The bad news is their starting pitching is stretched about as thin as it can be right now, and as unexpected as Joey Lucchesi’s excellent start was on Friday night, it’s awfully hard to count on him as any kind of rotation mainstay just yet.

That and all of the other uncertainty at the moment means David Peterson is a problem for this team right now.

At least it sure seems that way after he gave up six runs in the first two innings of Saturday’s 7-4 loss to the Giants in San Francisco, five days after giving up six runs in Los Angeles to the Dodgers.

At age 27 after a very solid 2022 season in which Peterson deftly handled his role as a fill-in starter, the left-hander looked ready to take advantage of the opportunity that came with the Jose Quintana injury in spring training, outpitching Tylor Megill to win the fifth spot (before the Justin Verlander injury) and seemingly oozing with confidence.

Yet here he sits after five starts with a 7.36 ERA, which ranks 73rd in the majors among the 76 statistically qualified starters. Among NL starters only Miles Mikolas at 8.10 has a higher ERA.

And while his occasional control problems seemingly were his biggest flaw coming into 2023, this season Peterson is simply making too many mistake pitches, and as a result, the league is hitting .311 against him, a number that also ranks near the bottom of all major league starters.

Perhaps more revealing, lefties were hitting .333 against him coming into Saturday’s start, and that was before he hung a 3-2 slider that lefty-hitting shortstop Brandon Crawford yanked over the right field wall for a three-run home run and a 4-0 Giants’ lead.

“The slider is something I’ve struggled with,” Peterson told reporters after the loss. “I opened up my front side and (the pitch to Crawford) was a complete miss right in the heart of the zone. I’ve got to get back to where I need to be with that pitch.’’

Big picture, it’s only five starts and his track record says Peterson should figure it out. Last season he held lefty hitters to a .177 average and, for his career, even with the struggles this season, he’s held lefties to a .224 average.

“He’s right, it looks like it’s something with his mechanics,” a scout said Saturday night when I told him of Peterson’s self-analysis. “He’s opening up too soon and his arm is lagging behind, which flattens out the break. There’s nothing easier to hit than a slider that’s just spinning in the strike zone.

“But I’ve seen him have a good slider in the past so I would think he’ll be able to fix it. He doesn’t have top-of-the-rotation stuff but he’s developed a pretty good change-up that gets righties out, and he’s got some ride on his fastball, so when he’s commanding his stuff he’s got a three-pitch mix that makes him a solid starter.”

That’s the guy the Mets need right now.

Nevertheless, over this last week they’ve gotten plenty of timely hitting, not to mention the Pete Alonso power show, as well as some superb bullpen work, all of which have combined to cover up the flaws in the starting rotation, especially the inability to go deep into games.

Now, however, with Max Scherzer suspended for 10 games, there are suddenly significant concerns about the quality of the starting pitching, certainly in the short term and perhaps the long term as well.

At least for the moment, with Carlos Carrasco on the IL, Kodai Senga is the last man standing, so to speak, in the five-man rotation the Mets were planning on this season.

Peterson and Megill have filled two of the spots, but now Lucchesi and Jose Butto are filling the other two.

Lucchesi was one of the feel-good stories of the season Friday night, pitching in the big leagues for the first time since June of 2021, two years after Tommy John surgery, and doing it in his hometown area with his parents and other family/friends in attendance.

But he was a fringe starter before his injury who is a finesse-type lefty, so expecting consistently strong starts from him is probably not realistic.

Same for Butto. The right-hander is a solid prospect but has never been considered a high-ceiling type in terms of his stuff. He did a nice job in Oakland against the A’s, getting through five innings allowing one run, but he survived a lot of traffic on the bases, so it remains to be seen if he too can offer much consistency.

Megill, meanwhile, has been very solid, but has only gone more than five innings in one of his four starts, and that lack of length for all the starters is putting a heavy burden on the bullpen.

Then there’s Senga, whose ghost fork has lived up to the hype, but he too has had problems getting past five innings, and 14 walks and five home runs in 21 innings also raise questions about how well he’ll fare in the long run against major league hitters.

All of which means what it’s always meant for these Mets: ultimately they’ll need Verlander and Scherzer to earn their whopping paychecks to take this team deep into October.

At the moment, however, it’s just as important that Peterson stops pitching like one of the worst pitchers in the majors, at least based on his current ERA. And starts pitching like someone the Mets are convinced has the goods.