Oakland Athletics: The Dark Knight Cometh to Oak Town

The “Dark Knight,” Matt Harvey, is making another attempt at a comeback. And not to jinx it or anything, but the Oakland Athletics may just be the perfect match.

Matt Harvey has been signed by the Oakland Athletics to a minor-league deal and by all counts, we could be seeing the “Dark Knight” back in the big leagues very soon. We thought LA was his last hurrah, but Billy Beane is giving the once-great Mets ace another shot to revamp his career.

I really want to see Harvey get himself together and revert back to that great No. 1 starter that he was in New York. Smooth 98-99 mph fastball. Sharp breaking ball. Near-perfect mechanics.

And nearly unhittable for his first three major-league seasons even with a Tommy John surgery mixed in there.

The guy was one of the best in baseball. But then he started getting a little injury-prone and hitters started squaring him up on a more frequent occurrence, and three teams later, here we are.

I’m not really sure what to expect from Harvey when he gets a shot with the A’s. If we look at this year with the Angels, he certainly kept the ball out of the air posting his lowest-ever Fly Ball Percentage of 29.9% via “FanGraphs.”

Velocity continues to go down (and I’m not sure if it ever comes back up), but as we’ve seen this season, the fastball usage is the lowest it’s ever been (47.3%) and the slider usage is the highest it’s ever been (28.2%) in his career.

So, we can see he’s making adjustments to a drop in velocity that you want out of a guy in his boat. We’ve seen C.C. Sabathia move to the cut-fastball when his velocity dipped.

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We’ve recently seen Clayton Kershaw move to around 40% sliders with his dip in velocity and taxation of innings. Why can’t Matt Harvey do the same?

The Angels may have let go a guy who was starting to figure things out. I’m not saying Matt Harvey is back. I’m not saying he’ll ever be the same.

But with the stuff he has, if he can continue to develop into a ground ball pitcher, he’ll stick around in this league and land himself a stable home for a few years instead of bouncing around to different cities like he’s been doing.

Is he the missing ingredient to the A’s pitching staff? Probably not. Mike Fiers and Brett Anderson have been great. Chris Bassitt has been a huge surprise and help for this team.

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The bullpen continues to stay strong and anchor the staff with how well Liam Hendriks and Yusmeiro Petit have done. The only problem they seem to have is they’re not quite hitting home runs like they were in 2018 and Khris Davis‘s dip is a big reason for that.

Pitching-wise, even though it’s not a flashy bunch, this staff knows how to pitch. And if Harvey were to jump in there, I’d bet we see him take another big step in the right direction being that the A’s style of pitching plays right into his hands at the current moment.

The A’s are 26th in strikeouts and 11th in ERA, which says they’re a heavy pitch-to-contact group that gets a ton of ground balls, much like Harvey was doing this year before he was so rudely DFA’d. To me, it’s about as perfect a match as you can get right now if you’re Matt Harvey.

Hopefully, he can continue to work his way back with this Oakland chapter of his career.