Yesterday was another tough day in Mets world as Brandon Nimmo got injured sliding into second base during last night’s spring training game. Billy Eppler announced today that Nimmo has low grade sprains in both his right knee and ankle. He’s considered week to week. All things considered with how this week has gone in Mets world, this could have been a lot worse.
We will try again to distract ourselves from injury news with baseball and we got a good matchup to do that with tonight! Max Scherzer will take on Framber Valdez tonight! Valdez is coming off of his first All Star season where he tossed a league leading 201 1/3 innings including three complete games. He had a 2.82 ERA and 137 ERA+ and looks to be the ace of the Astros staff this year. We obviously don’t know how serious he is taking tonight’s game since it is a spring training game, but we are looking forward to watching our young prospects go up against one of the rising stars in baseball!
Three Things To Watch For:
- Can the Mets take Valdez yard? Valdez’s success last season came from his ability to keep the ball in the park. He lead the league with a 0.5 HR/9 and over his first five years has a 0.7 career mark. His highest mark by far was in 2019 at 1.1 HR/9 and that was the season his ERA was almost six. It would be pretty impressive if anyone can hit a homer off of him tonight!
- Max Scherzer returns to the majors. Max Scherzer’s last start fell on the same day as Tylor Megill. The Mets wanted to give Megill and opportunity to stretch out his arm a bit against major league players (made even more important by the Quintana news) so Max agreed to pitch in a minor league game in the back fields. He allowed five runs, three earned, over five innings throwing around 70 pitches. After the game he talked about how it’s a different challenge pitching in low-key environments, and that the game against the minor leaguers is a good mental challenge. There was an additional advantage too – Scherzer will be the Opening Day starter against the Marlins, so playing in the Triple A game meant batters got to see him one time less this spring.
- Tommy Pham gets more attention: Tommy Pham is one of the internal options for Nimmo depending on how much time it takes him to heal from his injuries. Curiously, Pham is starting in left field instead of center tonight. Pham has not had a tremendous spring hitting .129/.250/.161 in 36 plate appearances over 12 games. He also had fairly terrible 2022 for fielding with seven outfield errors.
Let’s Go Mets!
