Among the pleasant surprises of the Mets’ recently improved play has been the performance of their beaten-up starting rotation, which is without Kodai Senga and Tylor Megill.
The staff entered Tuesday’s 3-1 win over the Pirates with a 3.48 ERA that topped the National League and was sixth in the majors, and also ranked fifth in the majors in strikeouts per nine innings.
And their rotation’s ERA of 3.63 ERA was seventh overall, before Jose Quintana limited Pittsburgh to one run across five innings Tuesday.
Pitching coach Jeremy Hefner isn’t overly interested in those numbers.
Instead, he’s looking at the staff’s overall performance.
“I thought we thought we had a really good pitching staff, even without Senga,” Hefner said. “The depth with Jose [Butto] and [Joey] Lucchesi and the young guys coming.”
One of those guys figures to be Christian Scott, who had seven strikeouts over 5 ¹/₃ innings in a start for Triple-A Syracuse on Tuesday and has whiffed 26 batters in 14 ¹/₃ innings in three starts on the year.
The 24-year-old, a 2021 fifth-round pick of the Mets out of the University of Florida, has obviously caught the attention of the organization and president of baseball operations David Stearns.
“What Christian Scott has done has been great and, frankly, what a lot of us expected he was gonna be able to do,’’ Stearns said Tuesday. “He’s a great pitcher, he’s feeling good, he’s healthy. We expected him to have success. What he needs to do is to continue to do that and I certainly have confidence that he’ll be able to do that and when the opportunity presents itself, he’ll be ready.”
Scott has supplanted Dom Hamel and Mike Vasil as the team’s top pitching prospect.
The 26-year-old Butto has been a good addition to the rotation, but after the failed experiment with Julio Teheran — who was designated for assignment after one poor start — the Mets will no doubt need more arms at some point.
Stearns declined to put an exact timeline on Senga’s potential return from the shoulder injury that has him out until at least late May, but he did say he didn’t expect the right-hander to be out much longer than required from the 60-day IL.
In the meantime, Stearns hopes the organizational depth is enough to keep them above water.
“I think those guys are doing a really nice job,’’ Stearns said of the depth. “The way Butto has come up and given us very, very competitive outings and thrown the ball at a very high level gives us confidence that we’re in a good place right now.
“We’ve got a number of quality arms that are gonna get healthy here over the next month or so and that will help. But we’re always looking to get better.”