PORT ST. LUCIE – Shawn Estes sat in front of his clubhouse locker yesterday morning like a sponge, earnestly soaking up the pitching wisdom of Sandy Koufax.
The Hall-of-Fame left-hander made a weekend visit, and one topic he spoke about with Mets pitchers was his ability to pound the outside corner with his fastball.
Estes, who took the ball against the Marlins a couple hours after the impromptu chat, figured it was time to put the knowledge to good use.
“That’s the one pitch I haven’t really worked a lot on in game situations,” the Mets left-hander said. “I was really concentrating on pounding guys in and throwing my curveball a lot.”
During his three-inning start against Florida, Estes looked like an All-Star one moment, and the next he resembled the young Koufax who occasionally walked everyone in the ballpark.
Estes issued five walks and threw balls on 33 of his 69 pitches. He also had four strikeouts, including back-to-back punchouts of Preston Wilson and Cliff Floyd in Florida’s 4-1 victory.
Koufax first met Estes (then a Giant) after the 1997 All-Star Game and the two re-established a relationship when Koufax came to camp earlier this spring. The former Dodgers lefty was a classmate of co-owner Fred Wilpon at Brooklyn’s Lafayette H.S. and has talked pitching with Al Leiter and John Franco for years.
Estes and Koufax chatted about many things yesterday, but Estes decided to focus on throwing the fastball away.
“That’s the way he pitched,” Estes said. “He wanted to pound that outside corner, get guys to chase it out there and get umpires to end up calling it out there a few inches off the plate.
“That would set up his fastball in when he wanted it.”
Estes lacked the feel of the pitch, although he was glad the game counted in the Grapefruit League standings instead of the NL East standings. The Mets only mustered four hits (one after the first inning), so it wasn’t Estes’ fault that they lost their fourth game in a row and fell to 3-7 on the spring.
In fact, Estes only allowed one run and one hit through three innings, even though he also lacked command of his signature curveball.
“I stuck with it and ended up throwing some good ones in the third inning, so I ended on a better note than I anticipated,” he said.
After Estes walked leadoff hitter Luis Castillo in the first, Preston Wilson hit an RBI double that one-hopped over the left-field fence. The 29-year-old worked out of the jam, although he walked two more men in the second and third.
Estes’ most impressive stretch came in the third, when he snapped off a curve to catch Wilson looking, then slipped a two-strike fastball past an unwitting Floyd. One scout had Estes clocked at 92 miles per hour.
“I did feel like I started to get into a little bit of a groove in the last inning,” Estes said.
Estes is trying to work on different aspects each time out, and the lesson he took from the outing was to keep battling. He kept throwing his curve even though he couldn’t establish it for a strike in the early going.
“I want to peak when the season starts,” he said. “There’s no reason to peak down here. Be lights out.
“Because spring training is a situation where you’re afforded the opportunity to work on things, and results don’t matter.”