Phillies make Harvey look human

NEW YORK - The myth of Matt Harvey was born on the day the Mets drafted him in 2010. On a conference call with reporters that night, two of the team's scouts had to quell the fears and questions about a single game during Harvey's career at the University of North Carolina.

Earlier that year, Harvey had thrown a startling 157 pitches in a complete-game victory over Clemson, and the scouts made a point to mention that Harvey had struck out 15, that his final pitch had been a 95-m.p.h. fastball, that he seemed to get stronger later in the game. The message was clear: This kid was special. He'd be up soon and around for a while. Just wait.

It took Harvey just two years of seasoning in the Mets' farm system before he debuted for them, another year before Sports Illustrated turned him into New York's latest superhero, and another three months before that telltale tingling in his right elbow forced him into Tommy John surgery and forced the Mets to shut him down for a year and a half.

So here was Harvey on Tuesday night, making his first start at Citi Field since August 2013, returning as the biggest baseball star in America's biggest city, and the Phillies were supposed to play their role, too. They were supposed to stand at the plate, wave their feeble bats at Harvey's fastball, and concede the coronation.

Yet on a night full of strange happenings - two replay challenges, four hit batters, a muffed-up catcher's interference call by home-plate umpire Alfonso Marquez, Marquez's subsequent ejection of Mets manager Terry Collins - maybe the strangest was this: Even in their 6-5 loss, the Phillies managed to make Harvey look mortal. He lasted six innings and 94 pitches, struck out eight, and was at times overpowering, but the Phillies - batting .216 at a team ahead of Tuesday - got to him for three runs and five hits, including home runs by Chase Utley and Cody Asche. For a team of such low expectations, Tuesday qualified as something of a success, just for the ability to avoid embarrassment.

"Everyone's expecting Matt to be Superman, and he was early," Collins said. "Then he didn't have his great stuff."

Harvey had thrown six shutout innings last week in his first start this season, against the Nationals, striking out nine and walking one. That dominant performance and the promise of how Harvey might follow it Tuesday worked the Citi Field crowd of nearly 40,000 into a lather before his first pitch.

Aerosmith's "Back in the Saddle" blared from the stadium sound system as Harvey warmed up, and when he struck out Odubel Herrera and Freddy Galvis on seven pitches - one a fastball that reached 99 m.p.h. - the noise ignited the sensation that this wasn't early April but mid-October, that facing Harvey at Citi Field will be as close as the Phillies get to a playoff atmosphere for the foreseeable future.

Then Utley cracked a fat 1-2 curveball over the wall in right field, and in the beat of a heart, the place went dead silent, as if a giant balloon had just popped, and the moment played perfectly into something Phillies manager Ryne Sandberg had said before the game about what happens when a great hitter meets a great pitcher.

"I used to get pumped up to face a guy like Dwight Gooden," said Sandberg, who over his Hall of Fame career batted .313 in 112 at-bats against Gooden. "You didn't see those guys every day. You had to come with a different attitude. Otherwise, you'd be looking at 17 or 18 or 19 strikeouts. A lot of times, I got excited the other way, excited for the challenge."

If nothing else, the Phillies did that Tuesday night. They met the challenge of facing Matt Harvey as well as they could, and if the game goes down as just another loss in a season that could have 100 of them or more, it also showed that the Phillies weren't ready to roll over for the Mets ace. That isn't much, granted, but it's something.

Matt Harvey will be around for a while, and the Phillies will see him again, and that next time figures to be a hell of a lot harder than this one. But for one night, at least, the prospect of looking out to the mound and seeing New York's brightest baseball star didn't seem like the worst thing.

@MikeSielski