NEW YORK — The legend of Thor began with a single pitch.
It wasn’t the first pitch Noah Syndergaard ever threw in the major leagues. It wasn’t even a strike, although that was kind of the point.
It wasn’t supposed to be a strike. It was supposed to make a statement.
And just in case it didn’t, Syndergaard followed it up with words.
“Hit that first pitch,” he said in a text that night to Frank Viola, his Triple-A pitching coach.
“If they have a problem with me throwing inside, they can meet me 60 feet, six inches away,” he told the world in a postgame press conference that late October night at Citi Field.
The Kansas City Royals had won the first two games of the World Series over Syndergaard’s New York Mets. Royals leadoff hitter Alcides Escobar, who loves to swing at the first pitch, had three hits and three runs scored.
In the eyes of the Mets, Escobar and the Royals were far too comfortable. Syndergaard’s first-pitch, high-and-tight 98 mph fastball was designed to change that.
Hit that first pitch.
Syndergaard already had nine regular-season wins and another in the National League Championship Series, just five months after his big league debut. But it was that pitch to Escobar, and everything he said and did in its aftermath, that showed he was on the road to being the pitcher any number of coaches had pushed him to be.
The Royals would win the World Series two nights later, but Syndergaard would become not just one of the best pitchers in the National League but also the most intimidating force on a major league mound.
“That’s a kid understanding what he is,” Viola said months later, pleased and proud with the transformation of a pitcher he worked with at Triple-A Las Vegas.
The Royals won the World Series, but they didn’t forget Syndergaard. They were even more impressed when they saw him in the second game of the 2016 season, when he shut them out for six innings.
“We talk about it,” Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer said. “And the one comparison we came up with is he’s the pitching version of Giancarlo Stanton.”
He’s a physical presence, a 6’6″, 240-pound giant with a superhero nickname, a triple-digit fastball and a slider that can touch 95 mph.
“I wouldn’t say he’s intimidating,” said Hosmer, not wanting to give anything away. “But his fastball can be intimidating.”
The fastball can be intimidating, and no matter what Hosmer said, Syndergaard himself can be intimidating.
“Oh, very,” Mets catcher Travis d’Arnaud said. “Very intimidating.”
He wasn’t always that way.
The first day Steve Miller went to see Syndergaard pitch, he showed up almost by mistake. He didn’t even have the right name.
“I told my friend that Mansfield Legacy had a game, and they had some kid named Snydergrass,” said Miller, then the Toronto Blue Jays area scout for North Texas, now the international cross-checker for the Tampa Bay Rays. “He said, ‘Well, his name’s Syndergaard, but he’s a [guy who should go to college]. He throws 86-88 [mph].'”
Miller went to see him, anyway. He drove to Mansfield, where Syndergaard was already pitching.
“There was this big, beautiful guy on the mound,” he said. “I thought, ‘He certainly has the body, and his arm is really loose and fast.’ But I looked around, and there were no scouts there. He was 86-88, just as my friend said, but it just looked so easy.
“You could tell his fastball was going to take off.”
It did. By the middle of that season, Syndergaard’s senior year in high school, his velocity climbed to the mid-90s.
Then came the day his high school coach remembers well.
“We were halfway through the season, and he wasn’t getting but five or six strikeouts a game,” David Walden said. “I said, ‘I don’t see how, with your size and stuff, you’re not getting 10, 12, 15 strikeouts a game.’ He said, ‘How many do you want me to get tonight?’ I said, ‘You’ve got seven District games left. You should get 70 in those seven games.’
“That night, he struck out 14 and threw a no-hitter.”
Syndergaard says he doesn’t recall the conversation or the game, but he does admit that was a big year.
“I feel like I had a little attitude change my senior year,” he said. “And I’ve continued to progress.”
Memorable or not, the story fits with what others have said about him.
He’s coachable. He asks questions. And while the intimidating mound presence had to develop, he always had it in him.
“I remember he named one of his pitches ‘The terminator,'” Walden said. “I think maybe that part of him was just beginning to develop. He really started to get confidence.”
The confidence is there now. When Syndergaard takes the mound for the Mets this year, he looks in complete command.
He has done exactly what he said he would.
“Most people think I’m a quiet guy,” Syndergaard told reporters this spring. “When I’m on the mound, I try to be as intimidating as possible.”
Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen loved to hear that. He, Viola and every other coach Syndergaard has had pushed him to pitch like the 6’6″ guy he is.
“You look intimidating right when you take the mound because of your size and how hard you throw,” they would tell him. “Now you just need to take that attitude to the mound.”
“The big thing for him was to understand how intimidating he is,” Viola said.
It took time. It took the disappointment of not getting called up by the Mets in September 2014.
Syndergaard was 22 years old, and he was the prospect the Mets and their fans kept talking about. A September call-up felt like a formality, until that morning he woke up and saw a missed call from Mets general manager Sandy Alderson.
“I just called to tell you you’re not getting called up,” Alderson said when Syndergaard returned the call.
It took a while for Syndergaard to understand it was the right decision.
“I didn’t deserve it,” he says now.
He got in the car when the Triple-A season ended, and with his good friend and teammate Logan Verrett, he drove 18 hours straight through to Texas. Syndergaard says he was so angry and flustered that he doesn’t remember the drive.
Verrett does.
“I think [not getting called up] gave him that motivation, that drive, that fire,” Verrett said. “I remember talking about it on that drive. With both of us, it lit that fire.”
That fire showed up in 2015.
Viola said in all his years in baseball, he’s never seen anyone make the mental transformation Syndergaard did from the end of 2014 to the beginning of 2015. Syndergaard’s teammates noticed the same thing.
“He had the stuff two years ago, but the mentality wasn’t there,” said Matt Reynolds, who played in Las Vegas in 2014 and 2015. “Now he acts like a guy who is 6’6″, 240.”
Syndergaard wasn’t always 6’6″, and he didn’t always weigh 240. When Miller first spoke to Syndergaard’s parents, the Blue Jays scout found out Noah had gone from 5’11” to 6’4″ in just 18 months. Noah remembers a three-inch growth spurt just going into his junior year of high school. It was so dramatic that some classmates didn’t even recognize him when the new school year began.
He got much stronger around that time, too, after his father introduced him to the weight room at the nearby YMCA. Syndergaard quickly became dedicated to building strength, a dedication that continues to this day.
“He puts on muscle very easily,” his offseason strength coach Josh Bryant told Stack.com. “If he decided to stop playing baseball and become a movie star with an action-figure physique, he could do it.”
Or maybe he’d just be a superhero.
Syndergaard has taken to the Thor nickname the same way he has taken to the great intimidator look on the mound—the same way a kid who grew up 20 miles outside Fort Worth, Texas, has taken to New York.
“I’m having the time of my life,” he said.
He was completely hypnotized by Times Square the first time he saw it, while in town for the 2013 All-Star Futures Game. He fully embraced a segment for the Mets’ SNY television network in which he dressed up as Thor and went to Times Square to greet tourists.
“It was actually a lot of fun,” Syndergaard said. “But I’m still not sure how many of them knew who I was.”
Last November, after the World Series, he walked around the city out of costume, just as himself. He stayed for about four weeks, before returning to Texas.
“I did a lot of thinking about what it would be like if we won the World Series,” he said.
When he showed up in Florida for spring training, going back to the World Series and winning was all he had on his mind.
Syndergaard would certainly open the season in the Mets rotation, but there was no way he would get the glamor job of starting Opening Day or of starting the home opener, five days later.
Matt Harvey got Opening Day. Jacob deGrom got the home opener.
Syndergaard got the second game, a matinee in Kansas City that easily could have gone unnoticed. It might have, if not for the way Syndergaard pitched in that 2-0 Mets win.
It was the day he unleashed the 95 mph slider—the one that shocked his teammates and the Royals, the one that Royals manager Ned Yost said “no man alive” could have hit.
“George Brett was in [my office], and I asked him if he could have hit that, and he said no way,” Yost told reporters.
“He didn’t have that in the World Series,” Hosmer said.
It was another sign Syndergaard is still developing, that as good as he has been, he’s still getting better. It was also more proof that he’s unique among starting pitchers.
According to MLB.com’s Statcast, Syndergaard has thrown his average slider this season at 91.38 mph. No other starter averages better than 90 mph.
His four-seam fastball averages 98.26 mph. Only New York Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman (100.14) and Miami Marlins reliever Brian Ellington (98.96) have been higher.
Syndergaard’s changeup average of 90.14 mph also tops big league starters.
Back in April, when Mets catcher Kevin Plawecki blocked one Syndergaard pitch, he ended up with a souvenir on his chest, as SNY’s Steve Gelbs famously tweeted:
“It kind of goes with the legend of Thor,” Plawecki told Bleacher Report later.
Yes it does.
“He starts the game at 98 or 99, and he finishes in the seventh inning at 99,” said Neil Walker, who faced Syndergaard last year and now plays behind him as the Mets second baseman. “You think, ‘Is this guy from another planet?'”
And then there’s the way he carries himself on the mound.
“I’m not going to say it’s confrontational, but it’s kind of like, ‘I’ve got you,'” one National League scout who has watched Syndergaard regularly said.
“Fearless,” d’Arnaud said. “I don’t think he’s afraid of anyone—and he shouldn’t be. Nobody intimidates him. I’ve never heard him say about a hitter, we’ve got to pitch around this guy.”
The high velocity comes with high-level command. Syndergaard has just 12 walks in 85 innings, with a 9-1 ratio of strikeouts to walks that is second to Clayton Kershaw among National League starters, according to Baseball-Reference.com. Statcast says only 64 of his 246 sliders have been taken for a ball—and only 10 have been turned into hits.
Syndergaard credits a simplified delivery, one he says is “night and day” different from the one he brought to the big leagues last year.
“Last year, I was gripping the ball so tight,” he said. “Now, I barely hold on to it. I’m using my legs less and my hips more.”
The “wonderfully repeatable delivery,” as Warthen calls it, has Syndergaard and the Mets hoping he can avoid the injury plague that continues to affect pitchers, especially those who throw their fastball ultrahard.
Not that Syndergaard is taking chances. He remains dedicated to his workout routine, and as Ken Davidoff wrote last week in the New York Post, Syndergaard has worked with a nutritionist who emphasizes drinking specialized juice.
It’s all part of the development of a pitcher who is still just 23 years old.
The development process takes time, but for those who were willing to look, the possibilities were always there.
Miller, the Blue Jays scout who first saw him, looked at Syndergaard and saw Nolan Ryan. After just one game, he called a cross-checker and told him to drop everything and make plans to see the next start.
By draft day, the Blue Jays were convinced. They had four of the first 41 picks that year, the result of losing Marco Scutaro and Rod Barajas to free agency and failing to sign 2009 first-rounder James Paxton.
They liked Syndergaard enough that they considered taking him 11th overall (they chose Georgia Tech pitcher Deck McGuire instead). They thought about him again with the 34th pick, when they chose Aaron Sanchez, a high school right-hander from California.
They knew not many teams had scouted Syndergaard as much as they had. They were gambling he’d still be available, but they weren’t willing to wait past the 38th pick, the one they got for failing to sign Paxton.
The Jays drafted Syndergaard and quickly signed him for a bonus of just $600,000, according to Baseball America. Anthony Ranaudo, a pitcher drafted one spot later by the Boston Red Sox, got $2.55 million.
As the years went by and Syndergaard became who he is today, executives looking back at that draft see that he went 38th overall and figured he must have fallen because of signability concerns. Then they look at the bonus and realize the Blue Jays actually underpaid for him.
The Mets underpaid, too, getting Syndergaard along with d’Arnaud in a December 2012 trade that sent R.A. Dickey to Toronto.
Dickey was a Cy Young winner. Syndergaard may become one.
“He looks like Nolan Ryan,” SNY Mets analyst Ron Darling told Mike Puma of the New York Post. “He walks like him. He acts like him, throws like him. He just has better control than Nolan had at that age.”
Syndergaard appreciates the comparison. He watched the 2015 movie Fastball, which studied hard throwers from Walter Johnson to Bob Feller to Bob Gibson and Ryan.
“I think of Bob Gibson a lot,” Syndergaard said. “Listening to him in the documentary, he was the nicest guy in the world. But then he was a savage on the mound. Nolan Ryan seemed like a great guy, and he was an intimidating presence on the mound.”
Spend some time chatting with Noah Syndergaard, and you come away with the same impression.
Nice guy. But I sure wouldn’t want to meet him at 60 feet, six inches.
Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.
Follow Danny on Twitter and talk baseball.
Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com