Posnanski: Harvey more than New York hype

Mets' young ace joining ranks of baseball's all-time great pitching phenoms

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Matt Harvey's numbers in his first 15 starts are the third-best baseball has seen since World War II.

BY JOE POSNANSKI

NBCSports.com

updated 3:28 a.m. ET April 27, 2013

The New York Mets? Matt Harvey might be off to the greatest start for a starting pitcher in more than 50 years. That sounds like a lot of New York hype, but it shows up in the numbers and comparisons. Through 15 starts, the numbers suggest, Matt Harvey has been about as good as anybody starting a career since World War II.

But, really, the wonder of a pitching prodigy like Harvey goes beyond numbers or comparisons. It?s a feeling. There?s something about a pitching prodigy that gets the blood pumping a little faster. There?s something about a pitching prodigy that feels unlimited.

Why? Maybe it?s because the pitcher is unique in sports. He has the ball. He starts every play. He has his own mound. The pitcher is the only athlete in sports that is credited with a win or a loss. You could argue -- I have argued many times -- that it?s silly to credit a pitcher with a win or loss. We do it anyway and have for more than a hundred years. We don?t do that for a quarterback or a point guard or a goaltender or a goalkeeper. *

*Every now and again, you will hear someone talk about a quarterback?s or goaltender?s ?won-loss record,? but that?s a little bit different. The language is different. You might say, ?The Patriots are 136-39 in games that Tom Brady starts.? You would not say, ?Tom Brady completed 30 of 42 passes and earned his fifth victory of the season.? It?s a subtle but important distinction. Pitchers are the only ones who turn plural to singular, the one ones naturally fit the sentence: ?James Shields picked up the win, while David Price took his third loss of the year.?

So, when a young pitcher shows up like Matt Harvey with insane fastballs and exploding sliders ? there?s something magical about it. Something unlimited. A quarterback, even a perfect one, needs receivers, an offensive line, a running game, a shrewd offensive coordinator. A basketball player, no matter how good, cannot take on five defenders at a time. A pitcher, though, has the ball. He is only limited by the imagination.

And so every time a Hideo Nomo or Dwight Gooden or Matt Harvey shows up on the scene, the possibilities are endless. In many ways, I?ve marked my baseball life by the pitching phenoms who kept showing up.

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I have no memory of Steve Rogers when he came up as a 23-year-old pitcher for Montreal. My memories of Rogers come from when he was older, that big mustache, the hair fighting to get out from under his red and blue eMb cap (Les Expos de Montreal Baseball), the glove arm sticking out to the left, the way he kicked the dirt on his follow through so that it seemed he might just fall forward and roll toward home plate.

But when Rogers first arrived on the scene as a 23-year-old former college superstar at the University of Tulsa, he was all but unhittable. He pitched a one-hit shutout at Philadelphia in his second start and followed it with a shutout in New York against the Mets. Through 15 games, he was 9-4 with a 1.32 ERA. Batters were hitting .192 against him.

He was in Montreal, of course, playing for a terrible Expos team. So it seems like his amazing start did not get the fanfare of some of the other phenoms of my lifetime. There was no ?RogersMania.?

Rogers would go on to be a fine pitcher, winning 158 games and leading the league in ERA in 1982. ?He was a five-time All-Star. But to me his pitching years -- and his Expos teams -- were always tinged with a kind of sadness and unfulfilled potential. The Expos should have won championships. Rogers should have won Cy Young Awards. They were good, but it always seemed like they should have been a little better.

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While, I do not remember Steve Rogers? debut, I have very strong memories of The Bird. Every baseball fan my age or older has those memories of Mark Fidrych. I was 9 when The Bird came up to the Detroit Tigers, and that was the perfect age to be for his act. The Bird talked to the baseball (or talked to himself, it was never entirely clear). He smoothed out the mound with his hands. And, of course, he looked like Big Bird, which was why he got the nickname in the first place.

He was like a superhero in a Detroit Tigers? uniform. I?m semi-serious about that. You have to understand that to a boy of the 1970s, the line between comic books and real life people was hopelessly blurred. Was Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, real or fake? Fake? Well, then, how about Evel Knievel jumping over busses on his motorcycle? Oh, he was real. The Superman ads said, ?You will believe a man can fly,? and Fonzie started jukeboxes by simply hitting them, and Elvis Presley wore capes, and Nolan Ryan threw pitches 102 mph, and Roger Staubach (who they called Captain America) kept bringing the Cowboys back from certain defeat, and Muhammad Ali let George Foreman tire himself out by leaning against the ropes and taking every punch he could throw. What was real anyway?

Then, Mark Fidrych appeared in this blurry world, 21 years old, and he talked to the ball, and he wouldn?t pitch with the same ball that had given up a hit, and he did this little walk around the mound after each out, and it was wonderful. He didn?t have the Nolan Ryan fastball or Sandy Koufax?s curve. Instead, he had voodoo, crazy confidence, a heavy sinker and a rubber arm.

Here is the best baseball statistic you will here today: In Fidrych?s first 13 starts in the major leagues, he threw 120 1/3 innings.? I?ll do the math for you -- that averages out to MORE than nine innings per start. He completed 12 of those 13 games, and that included three different games where he pitched 11 innings.

He won Rookie of the Year, and he should have won the Cy Young Award in 1976 (he didn?t because he didn?t win 20 games), and then he was never the same. He had injuries. Well, what the Tigers did to him, allowing him to complete 24 games in his rookie season and throw a million pitches under duress would be viewed as criminal negligence today. But, like I say, back then the line between superhero and regular guy wasn?t as easy to see. Nobody thought the Fidrych magic would ever end.

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