The New York Mets added another key player to their ever-growing disabled list today in the person of the team’s ace, Noah Syndergaard. He was placed on the 10-day disabled list, retroactive to May 26, with a strained index finger.
Syndergaard joins a host of Mets players who are currently on the shelf with injuries. The team is already without several important players such as Yoenis Cespedes, Todd Frazier, Juan Lagares, Travis d’Arnaud, Wilmer Flores, and Anthony Swarzak. The Mets are a veritable M.A.S.H unit right now, and losing a dominant force like Syndergaard will hurt the team the most for the near future.
Syndergaard has been pitching just like an ace so far this season, posting a 4-1 record with a 3.06 ERA and an impressive 76/13 strikeout-to-walk ratio. The Mets are 7-4 as a team when Syndergaard starts, mostly due to the fact that he has not allowed more than three runs in a start since Opening Day.
A strained index finger should not warrant more than the allotted 10 days for Syndergaard to get healthy, but it is still an untimely loss for a floundering Mets team. The Mets came firing out of the gates with a 17-9 start through the first month of the season. The team opened a lot of eyes around baseball with an early-season sweep of the division favorite Washington Nationals in April.
However, the month of May was far less kind to the Mets as the injuries started to pile up. Losing multiple players to the disabled list has caught up with the team in May, resulting in a 9-16 record for the month. The Mets have only scored 87 runs throughout the entire month, which is fourth worst in baseball during that span. With so many key players missing on offense, the need for elite pitching becomes even more crucial, hence why the injury to Syndergaard could not have come at a worse time for this Mets team.
What is also hurting the Mets is the fact that the rest of the National League East division, save for the lowly Miami Marlins, has played extremely well through the month of May. After a slow start, the Washington Nationals have returned to form by going 17-6 this month. The youthful Atlanta Braves also had a good month, going 15-11 to give them the second best record in the National League behind only the Milwaukee Brewers as of today. The Mets have been direct victims of their divisional counterparts in May, losing four out of five games against Atlanta and two out of three games to the Marlins.
The Mets will sorely miss Syndergaard’s elite arm during this stretch of unwelcome injuries up and down the roster. The Mets’ upcoming schedule does them no favors either, with series against the Braves, Cubs, and Yankees on the horizon. The team’s sleepy offense will have to step up in the absence of Syndergaard before the Mets’ season starts to go completely off the rails.
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