MIAMI -- Approximately 20 minutes after the Mets dropped a 13-1 game to the Marlins on Monday, Matt Harvey emerged from a back room of the visiting clubhouse. A staff member indicated that a group of media members was waiting to speak to him. Harvey shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't know what there is to say," he muttered.
For the next 70 seconds, Harvey repeated some variation of that phrase half a dozen times. He could give no explanation for the seven runs he allowed in four innings, nor for the 13.19 ERA he has posted in four starts since returning from the disabled list. He did not dissect the hanging slider that Giancarlo Stanton hit for a three-run homer, nor the 11 other hits he served up on this night.
"Everybody's watching," Harvey said. "I don't really know what there is to say except for there is nothing to say. It's terrible. It's not fun. There's really nothing to say. There's no reason for questions. There's no answers. There really isn't."

Harvey's soliloquy was mostly unchanged from his previous start in Chicago, when he gave up five runs in 3 1/3 innings. More dejected than defiant in both cases, Harvey offered none of the fire that made him such a notable personality at his zenith. He called the criticisms of his pitching "deserved."
His responses, in effect, matched his performances on the mound. Though Harvey's fastball continued showing more life, reaching 97 mph early in Monday's game, he could not command it with any consistency. The Marlins continually put the ball in play, collecting four infield singles. They swung and missed just four times, striking out twice against him.
The defining moment occurred in the fourth inning, when Harvey floated an 89-mph slider high in the strike zone, allowing Stanton to crush a three-run homer -- his 55th -- 455 feet over Marlins Park's ocean-themed art sculpture. The blast ensured that Harvey would endure another mottled final line: seven runs and just 12 outs, with an average of more than three baserunners per inning.
"When he was at the top of his game, he had three swing-and-miss pitches," manager Terry Collins said, as baffled as anyone by Harvey's ineffectiveness. "Right now, he doesn't have that."
Right now, he does not appear to have any. Since returning from a nearly three-month stay on the disabled list, Harvey has allowed 32 hits in 14 1/3 innings. In total this season, he has given up as many earned runs (62) as he has strikeouts.
Harvey's latest performances have called into question if the Mets will even tender him a contract beyond the $5.1 million he made this season, though that is ultimately a small price to pay if he can regain even a fraction of his old magic. More pertinently, Collins said the Mets will discuss if Harvey should make his final two starts of the season. The manager seemed resigned to that course of action as well.
"When somebody tells me why he shouldn't, then we'll consider it," Collins said. "I mean, what have we got to lose?"
The insinuation is that Harvey, who started the All-Star Game just four years ago, has hit rock-bottom, his confidence incapable of eroding any further. It is a notion that Harvey did not dispute.
"Nothing's good," he said. "It's pretty much terrible all the way around. There's nothing to say. That's about it."