Steven Matz Call-Up Completes Mets' Vision for Elite Rotation of the Future

The future still isn't now for the New York Mets, but at least they can see it.

At least they can watch it, day after day, on the mound at Citi Field and around the National League. The Mets would still need a Washington Nationals disaster to win the division this year, but at least they no longer look like a team that will be forever overmatched.

Though the Nationals may have Max Scherzer, Jordan Zimmermann, Stephen Strasburg and Doug Fister, the Mets have Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard and now Steven Matz.

The Nationals may have gone a full turn through their rotation without seeing a starter allow a run, but with their starters creeping up on free agency, whose future would you rather have?

It's not such an obvious answer, and at least now Mets fans can have their fun with the debate. They can even try talking themselves into the idea that the Matz call-up will help save this season, whether that's realistic at this point or not.

It was enough to help change the Mets' story and their fans' mood on Thursday, when FoxSports.com's Ken Rosenthal reported that Matz would be called up from Triple-A Las Vegas.

The Mets didn't confirm the news, but eventually other outlets that cover the team were all reporting it, too.

According to Adam Rubin of ESPN.com, Matz will make his big league debut on Sunday at Citi Field against the Cincinnati Reds. The Mets are expected to go to some sort of six-man rotation, with that announcement expected on Friday.

They'll need a lot more than Matz if they hope to win this season.

The Mets are 37-37, and they still can't score any runs, don't know what—if anything—to expect from David Wright, don't have a major league-caliber shortstop and have a very thin bullpen.

Kathy Willens/Associated Press/Associated Press

But how many teams in baseball have as exciting a young starting rotation as this one now does?

There's Harvey, who made coming back from Tommy John surgery look easy and has the remarkable record of having allowed one run or none in exactly half of his 50 career major league starts.

There's deGrom, whose 2.47 career ERA is actually better than Harvey's 2.61 and bested only by Jose Fernandez and Clayton Kershaw's among active pitchers with at least 30 career starts.

There's Syndergaard, who can look unhittable at times, although he's still just 22 and sometimes looks it.

And now there's Matz, a 24-year-old left-hander from Long Island, New York, who was making the Pacific Coast League look pitcher-friendly with a 2.19 ERA.

Eventually, they'll be rejoined by Zack Wheeler, due back sometime next season after Tommy John surgery.

By then, perhaps the Mets will have more real major leaguers to put on the field behind all their aces. The trick for general manager Sandy Alderson is going to be finding position-player answers without surrendering any of his big pitchers.

For now, he seems determined to try.

If the Mets could hit—even a little—they'd already be contenders. Instead, they just scored 11 total runs on a eight-game trip to Toronto, Atlanta and Milwaukee. Not surprisingly, they lost seven of the eight games. deGrom led the way in a 2-0 victory over the Brewers on Thursday afternoon for the only win.

The Mets have already lost three 1-0 games, matching the Tampa Bay Rays for the most in the majors. They've lost seven games in which they gave up no more than two runs.

Then again, as Rubin pointed out on Twitter (h/t Bleacher Report's Rob Goldberg) on Thursday afternoon, Matz did have a .304 batting average in Triple-A:

It's too much to ask that he keeps that going in the big leagues, duplicates that 2.19 ERA or transitions to major league success as smoothly as Harvey and deGrom did. The Mets would need that and more if they really expect Matz to save this season for them.

Remember, Harvey is operating under an innings limit. So is Syndergaard, and Matz will be, too.

In fact, calling Matz up now and going to whatever form of a six-man rotation the Mets have chosen is one way to help limit the innings all their pitchers throw in hopes of letting them get through the season.

Yes, this is about the present, something the Mets have cared and talked about far too little in recent years.

But more than that, it's about the future and what is looking like a brighter and brighter future for a franchise that hasn't made the playoffs in nearly a decade and hasn't won a World Series in almost 30 years.

For a while now, the Mets have been talking about their dream rotation of the future—the one that could end that drought. It's time to put it on display.

Calling up Matz makes it all the more real.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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