First, Max Scherzer had to deal with a little vurp, or whatever was happening in his esophagus as his postgame meal went down.
“Excuse me, the pasta,” he said, inhaling deeply and taking his second or third shot at wiping sauce from his face.
Then he talked about pitching for a bit. Then he railed about how Major League Baseball’s new timer forced him to throw seven, not eight warm up pitches before one of his seven impressive innings in Thursday’s 4-2 Mets win over Philadelphia.
“Why do we have to be so anal about this to have the clock in everyone’s face, shove it in everyone’s face?” Scherzer said.
This man is a character. When his two or three years as a Met are up, New York baseball will be less interesting for him. And when he was pitching poorly enough for even the Mets to wonder how much he had left, we seemed in danger of losing out on the full Max Scherzer Experience sooner than expected.
Now that he has rediscovered his mojo and — despite what he claims — his fastball, Scherzer can once again bloom as a weirdo-in-full, the type of character about whom we’ll tell stories for many more years than he is actually here among us. And we can settle in to watch a future Hall of Famer who, although in his later years, no longer appears to be spiraling down his twilight.
From the jump this season, Scherzer did not look like himself. On Opening Day he sailed through five innings against the Marlins, then allowed three runs and plenty of hard contact in the sixth. No big deal, right?
Wrong. It got worse. In his next start, Scherzer allowed five runs in 5.1 innings in Milwaukee. He then pitched five scoreless innings at home against the Padres, but it was a grind: 97 pitches and a fastball that just seemed to lack life and explosiveness.
Scherzer was merely surviving, and Mets people began to consider the possibility that he was suddenly very much a pitcher about to turn 39, rather than the age-defying ace they hoped they had rented for a record $43.3 million per year for two years plus a player option for a third.
We all know the rock bottom that followed. First, Scherzer’s sticky hands got him thrown out of a game in Dodger Stadium; when he returned from the resulting 10-game suspension, the Tigers shellacked him for six runs in 3.1 innings.
Throughout this stretch, Scherzer’s fastball looked average or worse, often arriving straight and hittable.
Then, during a win in Washington, it crept back to life. Mets insiders say that the right scapula injury that followed Scherzer through the early weeks of the season finally started to feel better around that time.
In his past two starts, including Thursday, Scherzer has allowed two runs in 14 innings and struck out 17 batters. His ERA, 5.56 after the Detroit disaster, is now 3.21.
The outing on Thursday closed with a high fastball that blew Edmundo Sosa away to end the seventh. It was Scherzer’s 101st pitch of the game and came in at 94.4 mph — but most importantly it appeared to have life.
After the game — between the pasta vurp and the rant against MLB — Scherzer credited the performance more to pitch sequencing than pitch quality.
“[It was] getting in a rhythm, working with [catcher Francisco Alvarez] very well, understanding what we need to do. I thought today the most important thing was sequencing… I had good stuff but I thought the sequencing was even better.”
I asked Scherzer if his fastball was better now than a month ago.
“No, I wouldn’t necessarily say that,” he answered. “It’s just that I’m pitching better. And when I’m pitching better, locating my off-speed pitches — throwing them into the areas that I want to — it makes the fastball play up. You can’t sit there and say my fastball is better. It’s that the off-speed it better, and that makes the fastball better.”
No doubt that Scherzer and Alvarez used the cutter, slider, changeup and curveball effectively against the Phillies, which helped his fastball. But even a baseball writer could see that the pitch wasn’t just sitting there middle-middle like it did too often in April and early May.
That’s Scherzer, though — a good-natured contrarian. In spring training, I asked if he used his fastball less last season because he was protecting an oblique injury, and he yelled and cursed at me. Then he said I had the right to ask any question I wanted, but it was his job to cut me off if I was wrong. He does all of this with a puckish smile on his face.
Well, not all of it. Scherzer did stiffen a bit on Thursday when asked if he felt relief that he was pitching better.
“No,” he said. “Cuz I’m just pitching like myself. I know what I can do.”
There was yet another side of Scherzer: The proud competitor. It’s a wild ride of intense emotion, having this guy in town. Here’s to his ultimately brief stay being back on track.