Recalled amid roster crunch, Lucchesi falls to Phils

PHILADELPHIA -- Upon getting the call back to the Majors this week, Joey Lucchesi hopped into the back seat of an UberXL with teammate Mark Vientos and drove the four hours or so south to Philadelphia, where he was due to pitch Wednesday night against the Phillies. Reliever Grant Hartwig made the trip as well, as the Mets changed over around 12 percent of their roster in the hours leading up to first pitch.

It’s entirely possible both of those pitchers could be gone by Thursday morning, after being heavily used in a 10-5 loss to the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park. By the beginning of next week, the Mets expect another starter, Tylor Megill, to come off the injured list and join their rotating carousel of pitchers. Reliever Drew Smith could do the same, provided his balky shoulder heals quickly. Starter David Peterson is due back by the end of the month. Eventually, Kodai Senga will join them.

After running through updates for those arms and others Wednesday afternoon, speaking for longer than he normally would due to the abnormal number of transactions that needed explaining, manager Carlos Mendoza looked around his office at a group of reporters and shook his head.

“Anything else?” he said.

It was meant to be a lighthearted joke from Mendoza, but like most gallows humor, the truth within was apparent. President of baseball operations David Stearns has been a busy man over the first half of May, making near-daily transactions in an effort to keep his pitching staff afloat. Mendoza and pitching coach Jeremy Hefner have turned to a six-man rotation as a mechanism to give their starters extra rest. But no matter whom the Mets cycle on and off their roster -- Lucchesi, Megill, José Buttó, Hartwig, Yohan Ramírez -- the effect has been largely the same.

Wednesday, Lucchesi gave the Mets four solid-enough innings before imploding in the fifth, facing six batters and retiring none of them (although one, J.T. Realmuto, ran into an out at home plate; another, Johan Rojas, laid down a bunt, but Lucchesi opted to try for an aggressive play at third, and all three runners ended up advancing safely). Lucchesi’s final line of 4 1/3 innings, five earned runs could earn him a ticket back to Syracuse -- not necessarily due to the poor quality of his performance, but simply because the Mets can ill afford to spend his roster spot on someone who will spend the next four days recovering. After his start, Lucchesi said he expected pitching coach Jeremy Hefner to deliver the news before he left the stadium.

“It’s difficult, but no one likes excuses,” Lucchesi said of his hectic, last-minute trip to the Majors. “I’m not going to make any.”

It’s not as if Lucchesi is alone in this struggle. The Mets’ rotation, a notable strength of the early season, has dropped to a tie for 22nd in the Majors in ERA. Their depth has been tested to such an extent that Lucchesi needed to spend four hours in an Uber just to save the day. And despite allowing five runs, he did indeed save the day -- mostly by getting his team to the next one.

This is the cycle in which the Mets find themselves as they navigate the end of a weeklong stretch against their chief NL East rivals, the Braves and Phillies. They’ve lost five of six and nine of 13, and if things continue this way, their game of musical pitchers won’t matter much.

During the game, Mets owner Steve Cohen, in response to an X user who had posted about blowing up the Mets’ roster, wrote: “All in the future, not much we can do until trade deadline.”

Cohen quickly deleted the post, but it caught like wildfire on social media. Might the Mets’ in-house moves portend more significant transactions to come? Answers to those questions, as Cohen noted, will come in time. In the interim, all the team can do is play better.

“I wouldn’t say concern,” was how Mendoza put it. “We’ve got work to do.”