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  Harvey, coming in with a 5-1 record and 2.04 ERA, started off Braves leadoff hitter Jordan Schafer with three straight fastballs to strike him out in nothing flat and looked so impressive that one out into the game, broadcaster Ron Darling was already thinking about seeing a special pitching performance that day.

  “It’s interesting,” Darling observed, “the home plate umpire, Eric Cooper—an outstanding pitcher’s umpire—he has been behind the plate for Hideo Nomo’s no-hitter, both [Mark] Buehrle’s no-hitter and perfect game, so I’m just saying.”

  “You’re just saying,” Gary Cohen replied.

  It took Harvey all of ten pitches to work a 1-2-3 first with two strikeouts. He took care of the Braves in order in the second as well, then ran into a little difficulty in the third, walking two, but struck out Reed Johnson to end the threat. The Mets had picked up one run in the third on a Marlon Byrd RBI single and added another in the fourth on John Buck’s leadoff homer, then Harvey really started to impress. Facing the heart of the Atlanta lineup, their 3-4-5 hitters in Jason Heyward, Freddie Freeman, and Chris Johnson, Harvey struck out all three, all three of them swinging, and did it in style. He got Heyward on three pitches—a 100-mile-an-hour fastball, a curve, and a changeup—then took care of Freeman on three pitches as well, striking him out on a high fastball that hit 98, and then needed six pitches, including two fastballs that hit 99, before he struck Johnson out on a breaking ball.

  “He had no-hit stuff,” Alderson said the next day. “This wasn’t the first time he went deep into a game with no hits. Every time he goes out there and gets into the middle of the game without giving up a hit, it’s a plausible result.”

  Gerald Laird put up a nine-pitch struggle before going down swinging in the bottom of the fifth, with Harvey mixing in a good slider and an excellent sharp-breaking curve, all enough to make Darling exclaim, “That’s like a not fair kind of pitch there.” Harvey struck out Dan Uggla, too, to run his streak to six straight strikeouts, all swinging, ten total.

  By the sixth, it was getting interesting. David Wright made a nice play at third, roaming to his left to throw out pinch-hitter Tyler Pastornicky on just the kind of little infield chopper that so often seems to break up a no-hit bid, then Harvey struck out Schafer again. By this time, Gary Cohen was pointing out that Harvey was on the verge of having an ERA of less than 2.30 after the first twenty-five starts of his career, becoming the only Mets pitcher other than Dwight Gooden ever to do that. The game broadcast cut to a close-up of the Turner Field scoreboard showing a big “0” for hits for the Braves. Reed Johnson struck out with a wild swing on an outside breaking ball, and Harvey walked off the mound having tied his career high of twelve strikeouts.

  For Zack Wheeler, watching all of this on the day he was about to make his big-league debut was both exciting and nerve-wracking. A tough act to follow! But Wheeler was never that kind of worrier. The night before, out for dinner with team captain David Wright, he’d told him he didn’t even feel nervous. It all felt right, the way he saw it, getting to pitch in the big leagues for the first time just down the road from his hometown, the place loaded with relatives and friends. Harvey’s masterful performance through six just added to the buzz in the air.

  Heyward came out to lead off the bottom of the seventh for the Braves and Harvey started him out with a breaking ball that missed, but soon had him 1-2. This was a game of great sounds; any time the Braves were up to bat, Harvey’s fastball was popping Buck’s catcher’s mitt with such force, it made almost a ringing sound, like the sound of marimba music. The SNY team, to their credit, picked up on it and put together sequences of the music of Harvey’s best fastballs. Then suddenly Harvey’s 1-2 pitch struck a discordant note. Heyward reached for an outside pitch and stroked a ground ball that thudded off home plate awkwardly, making an awful sound, and skittered up the first-base line. Harvey was off the mound quickly, hurrying over to barehand it cleanly and toss it to first—only no one was there to catch the ball. Lucas Duda, despite seeing Harvey come off the mound to field the ball, had just stood there, rather than going over to cover. It was an “error” on his part as clear as day, but a mental error, so this one went in the books as a hit.

  The magic mood of the day evaporated, but Harvey got a strike-’em-out, throw-’em-out double play and ended the inning with a groundout. The Mets scored two runs in the top of the eighth to make it 4–0, and in the bottom of the inning Harvey came out after loading the bases on a walk and back-to-back singles. “He ran out of gas,” Alderson said at the time. “It’s tough to strike out thirteen in seven innings and pitch a complete game.” All three of those runners came around to score against LaTroy Hawkins, working in relief, but the Mets held on to win the game 4–3. Harvey had now brought a no-hit bid into the seventh inning for the third time in the season, having earlier done it against the Twins and the White Sox.

  The evening end of the doubleheader was a Wheeler fest. He’d lived in Smyrna through junior high, then gone to East Paulding High in Dallas, Georgia, only thirty miles away, and he’d played a season of A ball for the GreenJackets in Augusta, 150 miles away, so people he knew from different places all converged on the Braves’ home field for the game. “I probably knew a thousand people there at the game,” Wheeler told me.

  “There were family there we only see every few years at a family reunion,” Zack’s oldest brother, Jacob, told me. “Everybody was there. If anybody was going to be there, they were there.”

  One concern before the game was about Barry Wheeler, Zack’s father, who had a hard time sitting still at his sons’ games. He tended to bounce up out of his seat repeatedly and liked to wander around, he got so nervous. But this time, the cameras would be poised to follow his movements.

  “This is a big-league stadium,” Zack told his father. “You can’t be walking around all the time. You have to sit there and enjoy the game.”

  A couple days before the game, Wheeler got a call from his agent, Al Goetz, a former scout for the Braves who also pitched one season in the Tigers organization. He said Braves great Chipper Jones would watch the game in Goetz’s seats along with Zack’s father. “He said Chipper was going to sit with my father to keep him calm,” Wheeler told me.

  Finally all the buildup was over and it was just Braves leadoff hitter Andrelton Simmons in the box and Wheeler out there on the mound, peering in for the sign from backup catcher Anthony Recker. “During the game, it was just me and the batter,” Wheeler told me. “I didn’t hear anybody. It’s all the same noise when you’re out there.”

  There wasn’t too much suspense about which pitch he was going to throw for his first big-league toss. Wheeler bounced sideways a little, keeping loose, and then went into his motion and let fly with a low fastball that came in knee-high but missed outside by a couple of inches. His second pitch, also a fastball, was low and away. He took his time, trying to look cool, whatever the truth of the matter was, and came back with another fastball to the same spot, but this one caught the corner and home-plate umpire Paul Schrieber did not hesitate in raising his right hand and making an emphatic strike call. For the fourth pitch, Wheeler nodded quickly, as if he and his catcher were on the same page, but Recker set up inside again and this time Wheeler missed way outside. Simmons watched a low fastball go by for ball four and trotted down to first base.

  Wheeler, clearly struggling, fell behind Heyward 2-0, but came back to strike him out on a 97-mile-per-hour fastball. He fell behind Justin Upton 2-0 as well, but got him to swing at an inside fastball for a groundout to Wright at third. Wheeler walked Freddie Freeman on four pitches, none close, and then stood on the mound using the back of his arm to wipe away some sweat from his face to try to collect himself in the warm, humid Georgia evening.

  Wright came trotting over from third for a little mound conference to calm down the rookie starter, who had told him the night before he wasn’t nervous.

  “You’re a liar,” Wright told him, flashing his amiable grin. “You
do look nervous.”

  Wheeler had to laugh at that.

  “It calmed me down a little bit,” he later told Newsday.

  Facing B. J. Upton, Wheeler missed high again, as I’d seen him do back in Triple-A when he was struggling, flying open as the baseball people like to say, and again he fell behind 2-0. But he came back to get Upton on a groundout to third to end the inning. The two walks may have been the last thing he wanted for his debut inning, but the “0” worked out just fine.

  “I’ve always had a problem walking people,” Wheeler told me. “When you do that, people are going to score a lot of times. So I have this mentality: If someone gets on base, whether by a hit or a walk, they might get to second base, but they’re not going to get any farther than that. You have to pull back and get in that little area in your mind where you know you have to concentrate a little more and just go after that guy.”

  Out for the second inning, Wheeler still had the blank look of someone fighting back a certain amount of raw terror, but everything else about him had changed. His first pitch was a good, crisp breaking ball that snapped in place for a called strike against Brian McCann. He followed that up with a well-placed fastball, in on the hands, and McCann could do nothing but foul it off harmlessly. It was Wheeler’s first 0-2 count and he made the most of it, not messing around with a setup pitch, but coming right back with a 96-mile-per-hour fastball up above the belt to strike out McCann.

  “He knows Heyward and McCann, he’s been around hanging out with them at different events or whatever,” Adam Wheeler told me. “It might have made him feel a little more comfortable facing people he actually knows.”

  Dan Uggla went up looking for a fastball, got one, and drilled it to the wall in left-center for a double, but then Wheeler struck out third baseman Chris Johnson on three pitches. That left only the pitcher, Paul Maholm, and Wheeler struck him out.

  “Watching him shut down the team he grew up watching, you couldn’t have written a better script,” Jacob Wheeler told me.

  Wheeler did not have a single 1-2-3 inning. But every time he had to have an out, he got it. In the fourth McCann and Uggla both flied out, then Johnson reached on a flare single—and Wheeler struck out the pitcher Maholm again. An inning later, Simmons led off with a single, but Wheeler got Heyward to hit into a double play and Justin Upton grounded out. Finally, in the sixth B. J. Upton singled with one out and stole second, and Wheeler walked McCann—but he ended the threat with a strikeout and a pop-up.

  It was easily the best day of the year for the Mets: Harvey at his most dominating and Wheeler showing his talent, yes, but more important, his poise under pressure in pitching six shutout innings to pick up a victory in his major-league debut. “What was impressive was the way he got himself out of trouble,” Alderson told me. “Unfortunately, his mechanics were not as tight as he would have liked, but that’s a function of his youth and the circumstances. Given the number of base runners he had, his ability to focus and get out of trouble was terrific. It had the potential to be either a very good day or a very bad day for us, with all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Wheeler. It turned out to be very good.”

  Over his next two starts, Wheeler served to demonstrate why the Mets had left him in Triple-A as long as they had. He took a no-decision in Chicago with a rough outing against the White Sox and then pitched for the first time before the Citi Field fans on June 30 against the Nationals. Other than Josh Satin, who went 2-for-4 to lift his average with the Mets to .375 in the three weeks since his June 11 call-up, the rest of the lineup eked out only three hits against Gio González, and the divisional rival Nationals coasted to an easy win after putting up four runs against Wheeler in the second. He’d looked in control in the first inning, then Adam LaRoche swung at the first pitch he saw to open the second, a belt-high fastball on the inner half of the plate, and lofted it to right field for a home run. Wheeler looked rattled after that and the Mets were never in the game, which ended up a 13–2 Nationals rout.

  Among the fans at Citi Field for Zack Wheeler’s first home start with the Mets was his brother Adam, a former pitcher in the Yankees organization. As far as Adam was concerned—and he’d had his look at plenty of players working their way up to the big leagues—the Mets had waited just long enough to bring Zack up, giving him enough starts for him to get over struggling with his command. “The timing was perfect,” he told me.

  As Zack struggled against the Nationals, Adam started getting an earful from someone he didn’t even know, who had no idea he was a Wheeler.

  “They brought him up too soon,” the guy told Adam. “They shouldn’t have brought him up.”

  Adam’s wife was watching him closely, wondering what he was going to say. Adam wasn’t sure either, but he held his tongue and decided not to get into it with him.

  “Give him some time,” Adam told the stranger. “He’s got to take a deep breath. Give him a few games under his belt and he’ll be fine.”

  Everyone loves a great story line, and as compelling as it would have been if Wheeler simply dominated in his first weeks with the Mets, there was something raw and unpredictable—and very ­human—about watching him feel his way. A lot of the best information that can be gleaned during a baseball game comes from indirect observation: You listen to the sound of bat on ball and watch the outfielder tracking a deep fly to get a sense of whether you’re looking at a home run or a long out, or you watch how hitters react to a fastball to get a sense of how good a pitch it was. Technology has gotten us to the point where cameras can track not only the exact path of a thrown ball and the exact speed, but also the exact spin, to plot total kinetic energy, and for all that mind-boggling analytical capability, still the best single test is to watch how hitters react. Wheeler’s fastball has that late action that makes it hard to hit, and time and again, hitters were surprised to see that action up close for the first time.

  Wheeler himself kept offering glimpses of being more of a potential star pitcher than first met the eye. For example, one of the traditions of baseball is that accomplished veteran pitchers routinely get calls that rookies do not. In a sense it sounds crazy: A ball either catches the corner or it doesn’t. But the way it works is often rookies get hazed, in effect, by having to deal with unfair calls. In his time overseeing the umpires as Major League Baseball’s executive vice president for baseball operations, Alderson tried to curtail this practice, but it was too deeply embedded in the culture of baseball.

  Wheeler, in his first starts in the big leagues, faced a large number of such calls, especially in his first game in Atlanta. He was, as the saying goes, getting squeezed. The interesting part was how he reacted. Often young pitchers who don’t get a call they think they deserve come unglued. They let it get to them. Wheeler was just the opposite. Again and again he shook off any agitation and put it behind him.

  “I had a kind of routine before every start where I’d walk out to stretch before I went to the bullpen before the game,” Wheeler told me. “John Buck and the pitching coach, Dan Warthen, would be there and every time I’d say, ‘Who is behind home plate?’ Buck and Warthen would tell me who the home-plate umpire was and how to act. Sometimes you could throw it down the middle and he’s going to call it a ball, just to see how you’ll react. So just get the ball back and go about your business and throw another pitch. And that’s exactly what I did. Just get the ball back and pitch again, and pretty soon they’re going to call it. They’re great umpires and you have to respect them. They’ve put their time in.”

  Alderson noticed how Wheeler reacted—and was pleased. We talked about how during that first outing in Atlanta Wheeler was clearly getting squeezed and not getting some calls, and Alderson replied: “We commented on that as well. There was a check swing. There was a play at second where we didn’t get the call. He also didn’t get the call on some pitches just off the plate.”

  Facing the Brewers in Milwaukee on July 5, the Mets having lost back-to-back games to fall to 35-47, Whe
eler had to fight through more adversity. He ran into trouble early, giving up two runs in the bottom of the first after a Daniel Murphy error made a bad situation worse, and had some control issues, finishing with three walks to go with only three strikeouts, but he held Milwaukee to three runs (one earned) over five innings to put the Mets back in the win column and earn the victory. Wheeler was not wowing anyone with his pitching lines at that point, and he was not going to wow anyone with his postgame quotes. That was never the point.

  “He’s doing OK,” Alderson said that week. “He does not have the same savoir faire as Harvey. Zack is a country boy. That’s how he sounds and that’s how he portrays himself.”

  But Wheeler may have understood his role better than people thought. Alderson himself talked often about the delicate balancing act to keep expectations hearty, but not let them get out of hand. Harvey fired himself up by letting everyone know he wanted to be the best; he raised expectations and then set about living up to them. Wheeler’s style was in a way more human: He never cared much about expectations; he cared about going out there and pitching well. He accepted both ends of the spectrum, the days when all his pitches felt like yo-yos on a string, he had so much control over them, and the days when he kept blankly staring at another fastball tailing way out of the zone. “Sometimes when you have better control that day, you can overthrow, because it’s more than likely to be a strike,” he told me. “There are certain days you can do that and days you can’t do that. You just have to know how you’re doing that day.”

  If it was simply a matter of will, he’d have eliminated the wild days long ago. But a pitcher’s development is more complex and inscrutable than that. Wheeler had to live through days of wildness to get to the next step, and he understood that necessity. There was no cutting in this line: He had to put in the time to know himself and the intricacies of pitching at the big-league level. His first Mets season was only a first step. “I should have done better, but I’m happy with it,” he told me. “There’s always something you can get better in.”