Edwin Diaz has never worked this much before, and it appears that fatigue is beginning to set in.
It was none more so apparent than in Game 2 of the NLDS on Sunday evening, with his New York Mets clinging to a 4-3 lead when the flamethrowing right-hander was called upon to pick up four outs — the final one of the seventh inning and three more in the eighth to navigate through the top of the Philadelphia Phillies’ lineup.
He finished the first part by striking out Kyle Schwarber to end the seventh inning with two men on. The eighth inning, however, did not go to plan.
The first three men he was set to face — Trea Turner, Bryce Harper, and Nick Castellanos — were fastball hitters, a pitch that is Diaz’s bread and butter when he is at his best. Yet it was understandable why he stayed away from it against them. He set down Turner with the slider but walked Harper on four straight pitches — three of them sliders. Nick Castellanos then took a 98.1 mph fastball that stayed up in the zone the other way to put runners on the corners.
“I lost my control a little bit,” Diaz said. “I made a really good pitch to Castellanos. He just blooped it to the other side.”
The next man up, Bryson Stott, is not a fastball hitter. He batted .220 against the heat this season, and 45 of his 93 strikeouts came against the pitch. But after throwing two 99-mph fastballs, Diaz threw four straight sliders — the last one was hooked down the right-field line for a bases-clearing triple to give the Phillies the lead.
The Mets lost the game 7-6 with a walk-off single by Castellanos off Tylor Megill, settling for a split in Philadelphia.
Between the seventh and eighth innings, though, Diaz threw 25 pitches. Only eight of them were fastballs, and while they averaged 98.8 mph, the lack of usage suggests that he is starting to tire under a workload that he has not experienced before.
Over his last four outings, beginning on Sept. 29 against the Milwaukee Brewers on what should have been the final day of the regular season, Diaz has thrown 130 pitches in an eight-day span. He has never thrown that many pitches across four successive outings; the only comparable stretch overlaps with this current one. Diaz threw 113 pitches in four appearances in the final four games of the regular season.
A bulk of that came on back-to-back days with the Mets desperate to clinch a postseason spot. He threw 26 pitches to close out the Brewers on Sept. 29 and 40 the following day against the Atlanta Braves.
He then went 1.2 innings in Game 3 of the Wild Card Series against Milwaukee, throwing 39 more.
The 30-year-old last threw 100 or more pitches in four games back in 2016 with the Seattle Mariners.
Diaz understandably denied such allegations of being tired: “I’ve been feeling fine. I’ve been able to work. This is a big moment for us. I have to be ready always.”
Yet this burden has not been placed on his shoulders in quite some time. After missing all of last season with a knee injury, Diaz pitched back-to-back days eight times during the first three months of the 2024 season. Over a 32-day stretch from Aug. 29 to Sept. 30, he went back-to-back days six times.
Now, with the stakes getting increasingly higher with each passing day that the Mets’ season stays alive, manager Carlos Mendoza has to find a way to create some downtime for his closer, who has blown saves in two of his last three outings.
