The eyes have it: Max Scherzer is something special

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — One night at the peak of his pitching powers, after he had had his way with the Mets, Max Scherzer was almost done. It was the seventh inning. The Nationals were comfortably ahead. He had thrown 112 pitches and just walked the light-hitting No. 8 batter, Alejandro De Aza, with the last two balls missing by a lot.

Dusty Baker visited the mound and, undecided on whether to remove Scherzer from the game, wanted to know: Did his ace have enough energy left to get the next Met and finish the frame? Scherzer told his manager yes. Baker was not convinced.

“I believe in looking in their eyes,” Baker recalled recently. “I said, ‘Look at me.’ He wasn’t looking at me. I said, ‘How do I know you got enough? Which eye should I look at, the blue or the brown?’ ”

Scherzer has a rare condition called heterochromia iridis, which causes each iris to be a different color. The left is brown, with lots of melanin, and the right is blue, with a dearth of it. In the heat of the moment, this apparently was distracting to Baker, who was in the first half of the first season of his 2016-17 run with Washington, a stretch that coincided with Scherzer winning back-to-back Cy Young Awards.

In immediate response to Baker’s query, Scherzer grunted in his typical fierce, I’m-in-the-middle-of-something way: “The [expletive] brown one.”

“The brown one told me he had enough left,” Baker said stone-faced. “I went back to the dugout, and he got the guy.”

So, uh, hey Max, just curious . . . why the brown one?

“Because the brown is the pitching eye,” Scherzer said, laughing and confirming Baker’s re-telling. “And the blue one is sexy.”

Perhaps that, then, reveals the two sides of Max Scherzer, a 37-year-old righthander who in November received the largest free-agent contract in Mets history at $130 million over three years.

He has his brown-eye side, as the all-business, all-world, famously intense pitcher who has blended old-school feel with new-school data to rack up three Cy Young Awards, eight All-Star honors and an on-field resume that puts him on the short list for the best pitcher of his generation and makes him a virtual lock for the Hall of Fame.

And he has his blue-eye side, as a fun-loving smack-talker and prankster, bad golfer, wannabe hitter and guy who likes to play catch in weird places and argue to pass the time.

With the help of a dozen current and former teammates, coaches and managers — and Scherzer himself — here is a look into the two eyes of Mad Max, the Mets’ newest superstar.

THE BLUE EYE

In the approximately 130 games per year when Scherzer is not the starting pitcher, he has a certain routine: Wait till just about first pitch, pound some preworkout — a supplement meant to provide an energy boost before physically strenuous activity — and find a seat in the dugout, ready to chirp.

He doesn’t really need the extreme caffeine but, well, “I want to be fired up for the boys,” he said.

“He’ll sit there all game,” said Alex Avila, a new MLB Network analyst who caught Scherzer for 113 games, more than double anyone else. “In between starts, a lot of [starters] might be down there for an inning or two, then they go to the clubhouse and get a massage or something like that. He’s there just about every single inning in the dugout with his teammates cheering everybody on, talking [expletive] to the other team and being a good teammate. Any time that camera pans to the dugout, Max is going to be talking to somebody. And more than likely, he’s going to be talking baseball.”

That is Scherzer’s trademark borderline maniacal competitiveness, plain for the baseball world to see when he is pitching, presenting itself in one of numerous other environments. He needs an outlet when he is not on the mound, and he will take basically anything.

When the Nationals celebrated National Cabbage Day — a real thing, every Feb. 17 — with cabbage relay races, for example, pitting Team Scherzer against Team (Stephen) Strasburg, he demanded excellence. Teammates defer to him when organizing fantasy football leagues, in which he is a perennial contender, and March Madness pools.

He insisted on a rematch after Bryan Holaday, one of his best friends in baseball, held his breath underwater in the pool longer. That was a 2020 quarantine activity when Holaday brought his family to live with the Scherzers for what they thought would be a weekend break from baseball.

He even turns playing catch into a long-term game with himself, collecting locations. When he needs to throw the day before a start, but the team is off and he doesn’t want to go to the ballpark, he’ll bring a ball and a glove somewhere else — somewhere different. His spots include Central Park, an aircraft carrier, the then-Staples Center, hotel parking lots, an apartment complex near Chicago and the street outside his South Florida home (irritating a neighbor’s dog with every pop of the glove).

And then there is golf. Scherzer is not good, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

“He tries to play it off,” said Holaday, a Tigers teammate of Scherzer’s. “He does the whole ‘oh, whatever, I don’t care, it’s golf.’ But you can tell it drives him crazy.”

Or as Kevin Long, former Mets and Nationals hitting coach, put it: “He kinda stinks.”

And Scherzer, less than revved up: “You can’t be the best at everything. You can try. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to be. I get it. I’m not going to be the best at everything.”

But just like when he faces the pressure of the October spotlight, Scherzer can turn it up when the friendly wagers on the course become, ahem, larger friendly wagers.

“It pisses me off, because he won’t show up for, like, 15 holes,” Gerald Laird, another catcher from the Detroit days, said by phone from Busan, South Korea, where is a coach for the KBO’s Lotte Giants. “And then when it’s all the press holes and he wants to triple the money, he’ll hit, like, a 320-yard drive and start talking like he’s Tiger Woods.”

When there is no physical challenge, Scherzer sometimes will accept or invent a mental one, just for fun.

“Max loves to argue,” said Long, now the hitting coach for Joe Girardi’s Phillies. “He loves to prove his point. You can change his mind, but it takes a lot, especially if he’s stuck on something. You better make sense of it. He’s going to argue just to prove that there’s a different way to look at things.”

Francisco Lindor experienced this during spring training. He and Scherzer had been Mets teammates for all of several days before they engaged in multiple lighthearted but loud, animated conversations about whether pitchers are athletes.

Scherzer said they are, of course, and in a desire to prove it, he challenged Lindor to a one-on-one basketball game. Citing his 5-11-on-a-good-day frame as the reason he doesn’t like to play, Lindor declined that invitation but allowed that pitchers are “some form of athletic.”

“He has a better chance of hitting the ball than playing shortstop,” Lindor said.

About that: Despite developing a reputation as something of a batting cage rat, Scherzer has a very low chance of hitting the ball.

His most recent — and probably last — hit came on Sept. 18, 2019, against the Cardinals’ Adam Wainwright. Then he went 0-for-71 (including playoffs). Then the designated hitter rule came to the National League, all but ending his time stepping to the plate.

“I’ll take the blame for that,” Long said of Scherzer, a lifetime .168 hitter. “But that’s what happens when you’re working with a high school-caliber hitter.”

Long, whom Scherzer identified as his favorite coach of all time, stopped to laugh at his own joke. Those close to Scherzer love to roast him, and he’ll give it right back.

“This is the type of stuff that we do,” Long said. “That’s the part that people don’t understand. He’s got a sense of humor, but it’s more like a sense of humor like ‘I’m coming after you.’ ”

THE BROWN EYE

Anybody readying to watch Scherzer regularly — after, say, years of doing so periodically when he faced the Mets — should know a few things about him as a pitcher.

He inevitably will snap at his manager or catcher or someone else, and it inevitably will look like a big deal. But it is not personal, he said. Just the heat of the moment. He has feelings.

“I’m pitching with emotions,” said Scherzer, whose natural facial expression when on the mound could be described as furious. “I’m a high-adrenaline pitcher. If I want the ball, it’s just because I want the ball.”

Laird said: “Max isn’t afraid to tell you to get your [butt] back behind the plate.”

And as much as he does always want the ball, he pledges honesty regarding his capabilities in a given moment. So if he still has enough — like that night in Queens when Baker asked which eye to peer into — he will tell the manager and pitching coach as much, with unprintable words if merited. But when he is tapped out, he will tell them that, too, to earn trust and goodwill so he can get that last out when he is feeling strong after well over 100 pitches.

That is the same approach Mets people have attributed in recent years to Jacob deGrom, Scherzer’s new co-ace.

“Everybody thinks about all the times that I say no and I want to stay in the game,” Scherzer said. “You don’t realize how many times I’ve said, ‘no, I need to come out of the game,’ or I’ve told the manager to take the ball from me. So every time I say I want the ball, there’s probably been at least five other times where I’m saying take the ball from me. You can say no, then it gives you the ability to say yes.”

But there also are occasions when Scherzer can’t pitch at all. Those bother him. He has dealt with a bunch of mostly minor physical issues in recent years — neck, back, groin, nose, hamstring — because such is life in ones mid-to-late 30s. Near the end of spring training, for example, the date of his Mets debut became uncertain as he suffered from right hamstring tightness, the latest in a series of what he called “hiccups” with the back of his legs.

That was the case last October, when he finished his half-season with the Dodgers on the sideline because of a so-called dead arm, a condition that affects shoulder strength/comfort.

“He’ll be your hero,” Avila said. “But at the same time, if he feels like he can’t go and be the best guy out there for you, he’s going to make sure the team and the manager knows so they can make a decision.”

A self-defined old-school pitcher, Scherzer combines that talent with lots of studying. Holaday said he is “a huge nerd.” Long described him as “very numbers-oriented.”

With all of the metrics available to modern major-leaguers, Scherzer wouldn’t say which he values or pays attention to. That is an ingredient in his secret sauce. But Jim Hickey, the Nationals’ pitching coach, and Mike Maddux, who had that role in 2016-17, said he keys in on opposing hitters’ take rates (so he knows from whom he can steal a strike) and swing rates (so he knows who will chase).

“In Washington, analytics were available,” said Maddux, now with the Cardinals. “He might’ve been the only guy who really understood them.”

Hickey, noting that the data delivered to Scherzer had greater “depth” than that given to other players, said: “He’s interested in being very efficient. All pitchers are interested in that, but most don’t do a very good job of it. He’s a big strikeout pitcher, as the numbers will bear out, but he’s not a big pitch-count guy. There’s not a lot of waste in his game.”

That is the pitcher the Mets are getting. But there is one last bit of advice from those who know Scherzer for those who are about to get to know him better: Have fun. Take it all in.

Rarely does a player of his pedigree and personality — brown eye and blue eye and all — put on the orange and blue. Maybe it is a sort of decades-later karmic forgiveness for a franchise (and its fan base) that let Tom Seaver get away.

“Enjoy the moment,” Laird said. “He’s going to do a lot for that ballclub. You’re about to watch something special.”

By Tim Healey

timothy.healey@newsday.com@timbhealey

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.