

ATLANTA – There is a story about Matt Harvey, one whispered around the New York Mets' clubhouse. It sounds fictitious. People who know Harvey swear it isn't. They saw it themselves. He stared down a giant bully, threatened to whip his ass and watched Goliath slink away.



Harvey would prefer not to talk about it, because he knows better than to gloat. "I'm not gonna discuss it," he said Tuesday, one of the biggest days of his career, an even bigger one for the franchise he now and for the distant future will embody. Now, in fact, is the perfect time, for the tale runs so wonderfully parallel to the Mets' recent history.

During his rookie season last year, Harvey was tired and decided to take a nap in a side room of the Mets' clubhouse. One of baseball's stupid decrees goes something like: Rookies pretty much can't do anything. That includes nap. The self-appointed enforcer of this rule was Jon Rauch, the 6-foot-11 relief pitcher with head-to-toe tattoos and the sort of perma-snarl reserved for nuns and rabid dogs.

Rauch, according to people who saw the incident, barged into the room with bucket of ice water, which he proceeded to dump on Harvey. It waterlogged Harvey's phone, which was resting on his chest as an alarm, and incited an even more electrical reaction inside Harvey.

He bounded up and challenged Rauch to a fight. Right there. Right then. He gave up 7 inches, about 75 pounds and a gallon or so of bad ink. It didn't matter that he was a rookie. Harvey would not be a joke. He would not be a punch line in Rauch's re-telling. He would not let some mediocre clown play him.

Rauch backed away.

From that day forth, everyone who witnessed the incident or heard about it understood a new Mets commandment: Thou shalt not trifle with Matt Harvey. And they gleaned something that they may not have understood at the time but certainly will going forward: If he can stand up against the big, bad leviathan and turn into the alpha dog just like that, so can the team that for the last five years has been nothing but joke after punch line after clown bait.









For the first time in a long time Tuesday, it was good to be the New York Mets. The franchise had waited almost two years for this. In that time, they lost 162 games, felt the continued consequences of cavorting with Bernie Madoff, saw their payroll dip below $100 million, weathered questions about the future of manager Terry Collins, choked on Jordany Valdespin's drama-queen preening, thought it a good idea to enlist a cougar dating site to pump David Wright's All-Star candidacy and led an existence that could be typified in three words that encapsulate it all: That's so Mets. It was not a compliment.

All of this was palatable because of Tuesday – because Harvey was here, and he was better than anybody could've imagined, and because Zack Wheeler was about to make his major league debut, and he had grown into something mighty exciting, too. These were just two players, two pitchers no less, whose arms at any time could revolt under the weight of which they're capable. Fastballs that tickle triple digits do not often correlate with arms that hold up under the wear and tear of producing such velocity.

View photos

Still, that was for some other day. This was now. This was Super Tuesday, a doubleheader against the Atlanta Braves. Starting Game 1 was Harvey, the 24-year-old star dating a supermodel, living in Manhattan rather than the typical Long Island or Queens abodes of most Mets, projecting the proper balance of intelligence, polish, wit, marketability and the universal glue: professional excellence. Game 2 marked the unveiling of Wheeler, another hard thrower but not really the same in any other way. He's 23 and from nearby Smyrna and hasn't had the accent beaten out of him yet. He considered sleeping at home until he realized it would probably be best to stay at the team hotel. He was always the more highly touted prospect during their shared time in the minor leagues, though now he was arriving to a flipped script, Harvey so good he may start the All-Star Game at Citi Field in a month.

Story continues