Matt Harvey has the confidence to say he wants to be the best pitcher in baseball — and the game to back it up. In Friday night’s marquee matchup against the major leagues’ biggest phenom, Stephen Strasburg, Harvey took another dominant step in stamping himself as just that.
With Doc Gooden watching from behind the plate and the Citi Field crowd chanting, “Harvey’s better! Harvey’s better!”, the Mets’ young ace proved it on a brisk night. He outdueled Strasburg with yet another brilliant start as the Amazin’s snapped a three-game skid by routing the Nationals, 7-1.
“I knew we were on a losing streak, so the energy was definitely there. Going out there was something special,” Harvey said.
Harvey (4-0) — whose ERA actually rose to 0.93 — was special himself. He allowed just four hits and a run in seven sterling innings, walking three and striking out seven. He pitched his way out of a bases-loaded, no-out jam in the seventh and prevailed in a huge pitching matchup he had embraced from the start.
“It’s hard not to,” he said. “It’s baseball. After reading the Doc stories, you realize who you’re starting against, especially with that lineup and the Nationals. It was there. It was something I knew I was going to have to take in and not avoid. I used it to energize the start and go out there and do everything I could to win.’’
Harvey’s 102 strikeouts through his first 14 games — his last fanning Kurt Suzuki with the bases loaded in the seventh — trail only Gooden and Nolan Ryan in Mets history. Harvey admitted having Gooden in the stands was special for him.
“It’s great that he was here,” he said. “I grew up watching the guy. That’s something special. When I was younger, I grew up wanting to be that guy, wanting to be like guys of his caliber. For him to say stuff about me, to come to one of my starts, its mind-boggling.
“I wanted to do everything I could to win.’’
Harvey was backed by the power of Ike Davis and Lucas Duda, who each hit a pair of home runs. On a night when Harvey was dealing, it was overkill.
“That’s what’s fun about our game, when you have two aces, two guys who are very, very good face each other, it makes for a fun night for the fans and for each team,” Mets manager Terry Collins said. “We’re going to sit here a lot of years talking about this guy. He’s going to be really something.”
Strasburg (1-3) allowed five hits and four runs, two unearned after shortstop Ian Desmond’s error on Jordany Valdespin’s grounder leading off the first inning. After Valdespin moved to third on Daniel Murphy’s single to right, he scored on a wild pitch to David Wright. Murphy scored when catcher John Buck — who had been in a 3-for-18 funk — singled to right for a 2-0 lead.
The Mets tacked on two more in the sixth when Davis and Duda each turned around 94-mph fastballs for solo shots.
Harvey allowed Chad Tracy’s RBI single in the seventh, and — after Murphy’s error — faced a bases-loaded situation with nobody out. But he fanned Suzuki with a slider, popped up Roger Bernadina and got Denard Span to ground out to end the threat.
The performance by the Mets’ current ace made quite an impression on the ace of the 1986 World Series champs.
“Awesome watching those two great pitchers go head to head tonight,” Gooden wrote on Twitter. “Look forward to watching a lot more of those for years to come.”
brian.lewis@nypost.com