00:00Joel Sherman back with three things. The first two today are going to be intertwined. Number one, let's talk about the Mets rotation. I was at the game. They played on Thursday. Jonah Tong much better in his five innings. One run unearned. The Padres are not a good fastball hitting team and he was really aggressive with his fastball, especially at the top of the zone.
00:2394 to 95. He had eight strikeouts. Seven came on the finishing pitch, was a fastball in the mid-90s. A good following of a scouting report by a young starter. It led me in the post, nypost.com, if you'd like to read it, to write a column.
00:40With nine games left in the season now, the Mets don't actually know what their pitching staff looks like for the rest of the season and more likely now the postseason, especially that first-round wildcard.
00:54I think they want to open the postseason, all things, if they don't need those last three games against Miami and can line up for that Tuesday of the wildcard.
01:02I think Nolan McClain is the guy they'd like to start game one, and when they could finish, they'd like Edwin Diaz, and everything in between is still in some level of flux.
01:13Having been there yesterday, I sense strongly that they think that Sean Minaya has turned a corner, and so if I were thinking about it,
01:22I think one is going to be McClain, two is going to be Minaya, perhaps with a piggyback situation, and then three might be Johnny Holstaff.
01:30But the reality is that Sprout, McClain, Tong, they've made 12 combined starts. We're already talking about McClain as the game one starter.
01:39I think Sprout and Tong are on this staff and in play for games, and they have six starts combined at this point.
01:48McClain and Sprout are pitching over the weekend. They're following one another, the rookies right now.
01:56I think the Mets desperately wanted to get Kodai Senga back into this, but Senga pitched poorly at AAA on the same night last night as Tong pitched during the day.
02:07I don't know how he gets into it.
02:09I'm sure Clay Holmes, who has a lot of postseason relief experience, at some point gets involved in this.
02:16But I think it is McClain, probably Minaya, and then to be determined, and there is an audition going on right now.
02:25As far as the bullpen, I did find it interesting. The Mets took out Tong after five innings, and then they went Rodgers, Raley, Gregory Soto, and Edwin Diaz.
02:40And I think that's their postseason four. Maybe not in that order. I think Rodgers will be very much the guy who goes after righty, Soto, and Raley, obviously, after lefty.
02:51He's in Diaz available for three to six outs. The one thing that I heard interesting again, and maybe this is wishful thinking like with Minaya,
02:59the Mets believe that Ryan Helsley is turning a corner too, and that they might not get back the full Ryan Helsley,
03:06but if they could get back any version of that, can they get to a five-deep bullpen?
03:11I know this doesn't help people who love predictions, but I think one team is going to get a very hot period of like ten pitchers going well for three weeks,
03:24and that team's going to win the World Series. And I think the Mets are in a similar boat to a lot of teams right now.
03:29The Yankees have Max Fried and Carlos Rodon. Who's their number three starter?
03:34They know David Bednar is closing. Who's getting the ball to him?
03:38The Dodgers' rotation is going great right now, but they have no idea who's getting the back-end outs in their bullpen.
03:45Whether they go older, Yates, Tana Scott, Blake Trinan, do they go young, with Robleski and Jack Dreyer and Emmett Sheehan?
03:54I think that that's in flux, which way they go. It's going to be a sense of feel.
03:58Why don't we stick with the Dodgers for number three today?
04:02Clayton Kershaw announced his retirement. He's one of the greatest pitchers in history.
04:08He's tied with Pedro Martinez all-time for ERA+, for pitchers up over 2,000 innings.
04:15Three-time Cy Young Award winner. He won the 2014 National League MVP.
04:19If you want to know about Clayton Kershaw, please read my friend Andy McCullough's book, Last of His Kind.
04:29What a great book inside the obsession and mind and passions and frustrations and victories of a singular pitcher, Clayton Kershaw, The Last of His Kind.
04:40Because a lot of his postseason failure, and that's what people will remember is the postseason failure, where he has like about a 4.5 ERA, is that he got asked to always pitch the extra innings, pitch on short rest, pitch in the bullpen.
04:55And so the numbers mounted on him then.
04:59But he goes down and is an historic great pitcher.
05:02And I just want to share an anecdote from the last time I saw him, which was in spring training.
05:06I was talking to him, and he showed me, he had had, you know, he somehow went to 2023 without ever having a surgery, pitching as much and as hard as he did.
05:17And then he had a shoulder, he had a knee and a foot in the offseason.
05:21You think, wow, the knee, I bet you that's the bad one.
05:23He goes, no, no.
05:24And he showed me video of his foot.
05:27And I mean it was grotesque.
05:29It looked like a butcher shop.
05:30What had to be done to his foot to open it up with the stitching.
05:34And it looked so bad, I finally said to him, Clayton, like, why would you keep doing this?
05:41And he kind of like looked around the clubhouse.
05:43And wherever he looked, there was a Freddie Freeman or a Shohei Ohtani or a Blake Snell or a Tyler Glass now.
05:49And it was, his point was as he spread it is, I got another shot to win now.
05:55And he had spent so much of his career until 2020 chasing a championship.
05:59And now he has two, and he has three.
06:02And it was a reminder that great players do need kind of like the carrot also, a dangling on the stick.
06:10And Clayton Kershaw was going to push his body one more time.
06:12And he's had a pretty good year.
06:14Reminds me a little bit of maybe CeCe Sabathia's end where he didn't throw as hard, but he was crafty enough to figure out how to win.
06:20And on Friday night at Dodger Stadium, Clayton Kershaw is going to make at least his last regular season appearance ever at a place he's owned for the last two decades.
06:32He's going to get a good applause, obviously, and he's going to deserve every bit of it.
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