Following Edwin Diaz’s rough outing on Thursday night, manager Luis Rojas said that he saw a “different Diaz” on the mound, noting that the reliever’s mechanics and emotions seemed out of sorts.
Diaz needed 35 pitches to record just one out, while walking two batters and hitting another to force in a run.
On Friday, Diaz spoke to reporters about the outing and he attributed his struggles more on his five-day layoff in between appearances than to anything else.
“It had been five days since I last threw, so I felt like I didn’t have my mechanics in order,” Diaz said. “I felt like my body just wasn’t in sync, and I felt like I was trying to just overpower the pitches too much at that point. But yeah, five days without pitching isn’t the same when you’re a little more accustomed to pitching maybe one, two, three days in a row, or maybe one day and then two days after.
“It’s a little bit different when you have that much of a layoff.”
Prior to Thursday, Diaz appeared in the Mets’ first two games on July 24 and 25, but hadn’t gotten into a game since then.
After the Braves arrived in Atlanta on Friday, Diaz spoke with Luis Rojas and pitching coach Jeremy Hefner. And while the manger and pitching coach had some constructive words for Diaz, he also explained how the layoff affected him, to which he said Rojas and Hefner were “super receptive.”
“It was a productive conversation that we had today,” said Diaz. “They spoke their piece and they gave me different tips that I can take, but I also gave them what I thought would benefit me. I thought five days, like I said before, is a lot of days of rest for me.”
Diaz has allowed two earned runs in his 2.1 innings, giving him a 7.71 ERA through his first three appearances.
After bring Diaz into the game on Thursday in the ninth inning with the Mets already trailing, Rojas didn’t say definitively after the game whether or not Diaz will be the Mets’ closer moving forward.
But the 26-year-old remains confident and said he’s open to pitching whenever he’s needed in a game, though he’d like to be used more frequently.
“It’s one of those things where we spoke about it, and even during the offseason and in spring training, we didn’t talk about a role. I’m open to pitching whenever,” Diaz said. “That doesn’t matter to me. It’s just one of those things where I would like to pitch more frequently as opposed to having those longer layoffs.
"I feel like I have the stuff to be a closer. I've proven over the last four or five years that I have the stuff and that I can be a closer because I have done it before."