Mets’ Tylor Megill debuts his ‘American spork’; Francisco Alvarez finds his power

NEW YORK — Like Joey Lucchesi and David Peterson before him this week, Tylor Megill finished his season with an outstanding start.

Megill pitched into the eighth inning as a starter for the first time in his major-league career in the opener of the New York Mets’ doubleheader sweep of the Phillies on Saturday. In the 4-3 win, he held Philadelphia to a run on four hits over 7 1/3 innings with seven strikeouts.

Megill pitched to an even 3.00 ERA over his last nine starts.

“It’s fantastic obviously being able to finish strong,” Megill said. “It’s been a hell of a year for me this year. It’s just grinding up and down, success, a lot of failure. To be able to come back, figure things out with a strong finish gives me a lot of confidence and allows me to go into the offseason with a lot of positives.”

On Saturday, he broke out a pitch he’s been working on behind the scenes over the last two months: a splitter modeled on Kodai Senga’s “ghost fork.” Megill calls it the “American spork.”

“Just watching him throw it when they know it’s coming and getting the swings he has, why not try to implement it?” Megill said. “My hands spread out real far so it feels natural to me.”

Megill had been waiting for a less stressful time to experiment with the pitch, and the Mets’ early 4-0 lead Saturday gave him the freedom to try the splitter out a few times. He used it for a strikeout of Cristian Pache, he said.

“I threw a few today, it felt good, now I go into the offseason and will mess around with it a little more,” he said.

Megill said that, unlike with his changeup, he can throw the splitter with full intensity and still create enough separation in velocity from his fastball. (On his changeup, Megill tends to throw with about 90 percent intensity to maintain enough separation from his fastball.)

Megill’s improvement is not isolated in the Mets’ rotation. Since the start of September, only the Brewers and Tigers own a better rotation ERA than the Mets. Peterson compiled a 3.88 ERA in his final 10 starts (including the one Thursday in the still-suspended game with Miami), Lucchesi a 1.48 ERA in his four second-half starts and José Butto will take a 3.38 September ERA into the season finale on Sunday.

While those are all nice steps forward, the Mets are likely to save room for only one of those pitchers in next year’s season-opening rotation, viewing the others as depth. All four will still have minor-league options in 2024.

“They’ve done things to leave a good taste in everybody’s mouth,” Mets manager Buck Showalter said. “They’re ours, whether it’s here or Syracuse next year. I think the depth of our rotation is going to be in good shape next year as we go forward. It’s just a matter of if they’re able to take the next step.”

From Aug. 2 through the first game of Saturday’s doubleheader, Francisco Alvarez hit just two home runs. Alvarez hit two in his first two at-bats Saturday night, including a grand slam that broke the game open in the third inning. New York went on to win 11-4.

“It feels great,” Alvarez said, conducting the postgame interview in English for the first time this season.

Alvarez’s first career grand slam gave him four multi-homer games this season. Only 10 players in the majors have more. Seattle’s Cal Raleigh is the only other catcher this season with four multi-homer games, and only Javy López, Mike Piazza, Ivan Rodríguez and Mitch Garver have had more multi-homer games as a catcher in the wild-card era.

Asked to evaluate a 25-homer rookie season, Alvarez was quick with a response.

“I think I can do better than that,” he said. “I want to do better with my batting average, I want to do better with my OPS, I want to take more walks, I want more RBIs, I want to do better with my defense — everything.”

Both Adam Ottavino and Tommy Pham have met all the playing-time incentives laid out in their respective contracts. For the second consecutive year, Ottavino has earned an extra $1 million by accumulating more than 60 innings this season. (He had $250,000 in incentives for finishing 30, 40, 50 and 60 innings in his deal this year.)

Pham will earn an additional $2 million by compiling more than 450 plate appearances between New York and Arizona. Pham’s contract called for $200,000 incentives at 10 different plate-appearance thresholds, with 450 the highest.

The Mets don’t have to pay out all that money, since only 264 of those plate appearances came with the Mets. For players who move teams during the season, incentives are paid out in proportion to playing time with each team. For instance, let’s say Pham had $10 incentives at 10 plate appearances and 20 plate appearances, and his first seven plate appearances came with the Mets. In that event, the Mets would pay him $7 for hitting the first mark and $3.50 if he hits the second mark.

In total, the Mets will pay Pham just below $1.6 million of the $2 million in incentives.

Kodai Senga can still earn some cash based on his finish in the Cy Young Award balloting. Senga would receive $50,000 if he wins, $25,000 for finishing second and $10,000 for finishing third. More importantly for Senga, his salary in each of the next four seasons would bump up $2 million if he were to win the Cy Young Award and $1 million if he were to place in the top five.

The one downside to the Mets’ doubleheader sweep is that it likely hurts their draft position for next July.

A refresher: Because the Mets eclipsed the luxury-tax threshold by more than $40 million, their first draft pick will drop 10 spots — unless that pick lands in the top six. So the Mets can draft anywhere in the top six and anywhere from 17 on; they cannot pick between sixth and 17th.

Major League Baseball instituted a draft lottery last season, so each team that misses the playoffs has a chance of landing in the top six. After winning twice on Saturday, the Mets can only finish with the eighth- or ninth-worst record in the league.

The other complicating factor is that the Nationals, as a franchise that pays into revenue sharing, cannot receive a top-six pick in consecutive seasons; Washington picked second last year. So the Nats’ odds of finishing in each lottery position are redistributed to the teams around them proportionately. Washington can finish with either the fifth- or sixth-worst record this season.

Add it all up, and we need two pieces of information to determine the Mets’ odds of finishing in the top six of the lottery: where New York finishes and where Washington finishes. As you might guess, where the Mets finish has a significantly larger impact on these odds than where the Nationals do.

The Mets are currently a half-game worse than the Pirates in the standings. Pittsburgh finishes its season Sunday against the Marlins.