Despite Kodai Senga’s sudden injury in his season debut on Friday, this could be a one-year season for Tyler Megill.
Senga left the game in the top of the sixth inning after straining his left calf while trying to avoid an infield popup.
Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said he plans to revert to a five-man rotation if his ace is sidelined with an injury after the Mets won 8-4 on Friday to move past the Braves for the top spot in the wild card bracket.
Megill will replace starting pitcher Christian Scott, who is on the disabled list for about two weeks with a UCL sprain, but a spot in the starting rotation is not guaranteed for Megill.
Before the game, even Mendoza didn’t know how things would play out beyond Megill’s scheduled start on Saturday night in a crucial series against a NL East rival.
“Where is Megill? In the rotation? Is he going back to the bullpen? Is he going back to Triple-A? There’s a lot of different things,” Mendoza said. “For now, Megill’s job is to start tomorrow and give us a chance, and then we’ll see what happens.”
This appears to be a one-off chance for the fourth-year pitcher to show what he’s learned from his two recent disappointing starts with the Mets, as well as a chance to extend his lead in the wild-card positioning.
Megill’s last start for the Mets came on June 29th against the Astros, where he blew a five-run lead.
Mendoza said performance comes down to execution and consistency.
For Mets pitching coach Jeremy Hefner, streamlining pitching tactics appears to have improved minor league performance in just under a month.
“He’s eschewing the traditional changeup and sweeper. He’s going to hold off on those for a while and then go for a sinker, cutter, four-seam, curveball and splitter,” Heffner told the Post. “That sounds like a lot, but he’s got two more on top of that.
“It felt like he had a thousand options. When you stand in the stands and you have 12 seconds to decide what pitch to throw and you have nine pitches and they’re all relatively new, that’s what happens. It can get a little overwhelming. And then you make a decision and then you’re not totally confident in that one pitch and you pull it back because you’re not totally confident in it. So we were just trying to simplify the decision making to help him be more efficient.”
After a shaky start with Syracuse, Megill maintained a 2.38 ERA in five games, allowing 18 hits and six earned runs with 12 walks and 33 strikeouts in 22 2/3 innings.
His most recent start was a success, allowing just one earned run over five innings.
Heffner explained that he doesn’t expect Megill to become a “super-efficient” pitcher — someone who throws 80 pitches over eight innings — but the Mets would like to continue to see him pitch five or six innings.
