TORONTO — The final innings of the New York Mets’ victory Monday over the Blue Jays had started to go haywire. New York’s bullpen had yielded the lead with a sloppy bottom of the seventh, and Toronto’s had returned the favor in the top of the eighth.
That’s when Ryne Stanek restored order.
In his most important inning as a Met, Stanek was his best. Firing 99 mph fastballs and 90 mph splitters, the righty reliever struck out the heart of the Blue Jays order.
“That’s how I remember Ryne Stanek,” pitching coach Jeremy Hefner said. “It was overpowering.”
It was also weeks in the making — a process that took longer than the Mets or Stanek would have liked but could very well prove to be crucial over the final stretch of the regular season. This is how a team diagnoses a problem, hunts for a solution and implements it on the fly.
The Mets acquired Stanek from Seattle during the final week of July, another piece in their midseason bullpen overhaul. After pitching well in a critical role for the Mariners for the first three months, Stanek had become expendable because of a bad slump. The Mets’ front office believed Stanek’s mechanics had gone awry, so Hefner knew to sit down with the righty once he was acquired.
“It was essentially the first day: ‘This is what were seeing. What do you think about that?’” Hefner said. “It’s much more a back-and-forth than, ‘You have to do this.’ We weren’t shoving it down his throat.”
“I could feel I was off,” Stanek said. “It was a lot of constant communication on how I feel, what the data’s showing, what they’re seeing, how the ball flight is coming out in catch play. It was a lot of good communication, which matters.”
The issue was that Stanek had closed off his delivery: His left foot was landing too far toward third base, causing him to throw too much across his body. He was leaving his fastball to his arm-side and couldn’t command his pitches well.
Here’s what a month of Stanek fastball location should look like, from April:
Here’s what it did look like in July:
Stanek hadn’t realized just how much his mechanics had drifted. While the fix wasn’t that complicated, it proved difficult to implement in the middle of the season. That’s often the case for relievers, who don’t have the benefit of longer bullpen sessions between appearances the way starters do.
Stanek admitted losing some confidence during that stretch, when one bad month seeped into another.
“No matter how long you do this, you’ve had a lot of success and then you have a stretch, the ‘Doubt Monster’ can creep in on you,” he said. “It’s a tough situation when you get out of sync in the middle of the year. You don’t want to be searching for something mechanical because it distracts you from the competing aspect of it. They gave me a little bit of time and space between outings to really lock in some things we were working on, and I finally feel closer to where I need to be physically.
“I’m really thankful that they were patient with the process.”
At times the Mets’ patience waned; with other relievers coming off the IL, they discussed whether Stanek should be the odd man out. Now they, too, are grateful they stuck with him.
“Because he’s been really, really good and we felt like if we were patient, we would reap those benefits,” Hefner said. “Each time he got out there, each time he played catch, he was feeling it a little bit more. You could see objectively he was getting closer to who he’d been in the past. That allows you to think you’re on the right path, let’s see it to the finish line.”
Stanek is an important piece for the Mets to get to their finish line and into the postseason. The bridge to Edwin Díaz remains unsettled, with Dedniel Núñez still on the shelf and Jose Buttó laboring more of late. Stanek’s eighth inning Monday was as impressive a relief inning as the Mets have thrown in some time.
“We’re going to need him,” manager Carlos Mendoza said.
“When they traded for me, that’s what they wanted me to do,” Stanek said. “It feels good to be able to contribute in that fashion like I know I’m capable of doing.”
(Photo: Ryne Stanek: John E. Sokolowski / USA Today)
