HOUSTON _ Matt Harvey pushed for his comeback. In the face of middling results in the minor leagues, and radar gun readings that revealed that his fastball was still in hiding, the Mets right-hander persisted. Returning to the mound, he said, took precedence over questions about his velocity.
It took less than an inning to know he was nowhere close to being ready.
The Astros delivered on their goal to provide a few hours of entertainment to their beleaguered home, beating the Mets, 12-8, in the city's first professional sporting event since Hurricane Harvey brought death and destruction to the region.
On the mound, that temporary respite came courtesy of Harvey, the pitcher who looked overmatched in his first action since shoulder trouble sent him to the disabled list in June. In the first game of a doubleheader against the Astros, he looked both ordinary and dispensable, a pitcher with a middling fastball and little command.
In two innings, Harvey surrendered seven runs on eight hits. He struck out three and walked none, though he plunked a batter and threw a pair of wild pitches, one behind the Astros' Cameron Maybin.
Looking noticeably slimmer, and with a fastball that never topped 94 miles per hour, Harvey was under duress for the entirety of his 70-pitch outing. The Astros tagged him for four runs in the first inning, when he surrendered run-scoring hits to Maybin, Jose Altuve and Marwin Gonzalez.
The Astros added three more runs in the second, with the biggest blow coming on George Springer's two-run shot. Harvey allowed another run when he missed so badly with a breaking pitch that he threw it behind Maybin, allowing Altuve to come in from third.
Vulnerable to punishment, Harvey paced stalked around the mound between line drives. Even the foul balls had been struck well.
In the days leading up to the outing, Harvey and the Mets dismissed concerns about a fastball clocked at 93 mph. It was a residual effect of the shoulder weakness that doctors discovered, fallout from surgery last year to treat thoracic outlet syndrome.
But there was no shrugging off what went down as the shortest outing of his career.
The outing underscored what could be a complicated decision for the Mets. Harvey reaches free agency after next season, and despite interest from other clubs, the Mets showed little interest in selling low on the pitcher in a trade.
But the first outing back seemed to open another possibility. Perhaps, after two major surgeries, Harvey's body can't fully recover. And even the potential motivation of a walk year isn't enough to remain a part of the Mets' plans.
"I'm not looking for or worrying about 96-97 (mph)," Mets manager Terry Collins said before the game.
But after two tortured innings from Harvey _ whose ERA this season rose to 5.97 _ it was clear that there was much more to worry about than just velocity.
