MIAMI — Jacob deGrom was rained out in his last scheduled start against the Yankees, but the Mets insist the right-hander’s appearance Monday in The Bronx will be as much about keeping a schedule as wanting their ace on the mound in the Subway Series.
Last week, manager Mickey Callaway adjusted his rotation to allow deGrom a chance to pitch on normal rest against the Yankees, bumping Jason Vargas to Tuesday night in Baltimore.
“When you are playing the Yankees it’s important to everybody,” Callaway said before the Mets beat the Marlins 4-3 on Sunday. “But I think it’s more about keeping deGrom on regular rest as many times as possible. We have some options coming up that we can go to a six-man rotation at some point, and we’ll have to continue to weigh how many times we want him to be on normal rest, but every chance we’ve got if he’s in a really good spot we’re going to continue to do that.”
DeGrom is perhaps the NL Cy Young award front-runner, with a major league-best 1.77 ERA. The right-hander pitched six shutout innings against the Reds on Wednesday in his last start.
“The one thing that helped was we got a little bit of a lead his last game, where we were able to get him out probably an inning earlier than we had been going,” Callaway said. “So pitching on the fifth day this time seemed to make some sense.”
Michael Conforto’s improvement against lefty pitching was again on display as he blasted a solo homer in the sixth inning against Wei-Yin Chen. Conforto entered play batting a respectable .243 against lefties with four homers.
“Any time you see the ball go out of the park it feels good,” Conforto said. “Lefties have been a topic of discussion and I think us left-handed hitters who have been here the last couple of years have gotten a chance to see a lot of left-handers this year. It’s been a good experience for us, just to get in there and be comfortable and now it’s not such a big deal.”
Amed Rosario walked twice and stole his team-leading 12th base. The second-year shortstop has four multi-walk games this season, three of which have come at Marlins Park.
