In final days with Mets, Max Scherzer lamented his struggles
Max Scherzer #21 of the New York Mets looks on from the dugout during the first inning against the Washington Nationals at Citi Field on Thursday, July 27, 2023 in the Queens borough of New York City. Credit: Jim McIsaac
In his final days with the Mets, amid his worst season since before Max Scherzer really became Max Scherzer, he was at a loss over his mediocrity.
On Sunday, the Mets formally announced their trade of Scherzer to the Rangers for infield prospect Luisangel Acuna, a shocker of a blockbuster produced by the team’s poor play, partially because Scherzer hasn’t pitched to his usual standard. General manager Billy Eppler called the deal “a repurposing of [owner Steve Cohen’s] investment in the club,” subtracting from the team to add to the farm system.
Last week, in a 20-minute conversation with Newsday that ebbed between the micro of his recent issues and the macro of getting older as an elite athlete, Scherzer, on the short list for best pitcher of his generation, didn’t totally know why he has had such a hard time on the mound.
The surface-level problem, he said, was as simple as a lack of proper execution of his pitches, making them move the way he always has made them move and putting them in the spot he always has put them. The underlying problem or problems remained a mystery.
“It’s not a drastic change,” Scherzer said. “I always feel I’m a couple of pitches away. I’m executing. My stuff looks good. I look good. But I get beat in certain situations.
“What’s dumbfounding is it’s execution. But what’s contributing to the execution? It’s execution, what’s contributing to that? I can’t put a finger on it. That’s dumbfounding.
“I can’t fully explain why. In any given game, I’m off in one area of my game. If I’m off in an area of my game, I get exposed.”
Scherzer mostly has been getting burned by the long ball, giving up home runs at a rate of 1.9 per nine innings — the highest mark of his career and more than double his 0.8 per nine last year.
For a while, he blamed his slider, long a go-to pitch that stopped behaving the way he was used to, hanging in the strike zone, ripe for getting blasted. Eventually, he felt he fixed it. Then a recent start against the Red Sox yielded a new issue when he couldn’t get his pitches to the up-and-in quadrant of the strike zone to lefthanders.
That is what bugged Scherzer: His getting hit around had a variety of explanations, a new one popping up as soon as he mended the previous one. Pitching coach Jeremy Hefner and manager Buck Showalter agreed, he said. It has created what he called “a Jekyll and Hyde season.”
“Hef’s on the same page. Buck’s on the same page,” Scherzer said. “Hey, if you see something more, tell me. It’s not like I have an ego about this. Everyone agrees with my assessment.”
Is he healthy? Scherzer dealt with back, neck and blister issues this year, plus multiple oblique/side injuries last year.
“Yeah. Oh my God, yeah. That’s almost the problem,” he said. “It’s not because I’m hurt. It’s actually quite the opposite. I’m not dealing with anything. I’m not having to mentally go through anything. I’m not having a blister to pitch through.
“This is the sadistic side. It’s not that it helps you. It’s that once you do that and you go through that and you succeed and you pitch through it when you’re absolutely [expletive] miserable — when it gets taken away, it feels like it’s less.”
He added: “As bad as I’m pitching, we can agree on that, I’m not upholding my standard — right? That’s fair? I’m accountable for that — the good is, look, guys are dropping like flies and I’m still, at 39, making my [starts], knock on wood.”
About that: Scherzer turned 39 on Thursday. By major-league standards, he is downright elderly. And he knows it.
In recent months, he abandoned his usual day-after-a-start habit of enduring an extremely sweaty miles-long run — typically in the form of laps around whatever ballpark the Mets were at — in favor of a physically easier routine that he said accomplished the same goal, flushing the lactic acid from his muscles. He declined to detail the new regimen, owing to his philosophy that anything could be a competitive advantage.
“I’m aging, I get it,” he said. “I’m doing what my body can handle. I gotta figure out these home runs. That’s it.”
Maybe, then, this is just what Max Scherzer at 39 looks like: toggling between being able to dominate and getting dominated, still capable of his usual greatness but not with the same consistency.
“That’s a fair assessment,” he said. Then he posed “the argument to that,” about how his velocity has held (94 mph on his fastball), how his aerobic capacity is strong despite the pitch clock introducing a new dynamic this year, how other good pitchers of all ages also have struggled.
Being a starting pitcher is so, so hard, he said. For 16 seasons, he made it look easy, winning three Cy Young Awards and earning eight All-Star nods. This year, his ERA is 4.01, his highest since 2011 — before any of those honors.
“There’s only 150 starting pitchers,” Scherzer said. “In the whole [expletive] world.”
He paused for seven seconds to prepare his next thought.
“Yeah,” he said. “And I’m used to being [expletive] No. 1.”
Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.
