Max Scherzer has a new April activity. Arts and crafts are now a part of his daily routine.
The Nationals’ ace is adjusting to his revised schedule while baseball is delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of long days at the ballpark, he’s spending time in Florida with his family.
“Train in the morning, nap time in the afternoon, then being dad the rest of the night,” Scherzer said on MLB Network’s Intentional Talk.
The Scherzer home is busy these days. His wife, Erica, underwent labrum surgery and his mother-in-law is there to help with their two young daughters. The household doubled in size with the addition of a former teammate and his family.
“This is a good story,” Scherzer said. “[Orioles catcher] Bryan Holaday, we’re good friends, and our wives are even probably better friends. When he came over and played [the Nats] in Spring Training, they were hanging out with us. And then all the virus stuff and the shutdown was going on, and we kind of just said, ‘Hey, if you guys want to stay.’… So we’ve got four kids going on, four dogs.
“We’ve got a whole little makeshift weight room that we work out at. We play catch, we run, we do everything. So here in our house down in Florida, we’re having a good old time.”
Had the regular season started as scheduled, this is the time when the Nats would have received their World Series championship rings and celebrated with a banner raising ceremony at Nationals Park. Scherzer wants to wait until baseball resumes to experience any of those moments, which means no peeking at the rings.
“Everything’s on hold,” Scherzer said. “We want to do that in front of the fans. Whenever we get back out there, that’ll be a fun moment we enjoy with everybody else.”
In the meantime, the thrill of last October is fresh on his mind. For that reason, he hasn’t rewatched Game 7 of the World Series against the Astros, but he has seen the documentary that recounts the Nationals’ run to the title.
“It was fun to relive all the moments again,” Scherzer said. “Going through the whole postseason, Game 5 in L.A., [National League] Wild Card Game, you name it, how many different moments that everybody had. To actually culminate into Game 7, just how everything transpired, it was the right way for us to be able to end the season. That’s our storybook ending.”
Scherzer said he is reminded of what he and the Nats accomplished last year in random ways. He doesn’t necessarily have to be on the mound to appreciate their feat.
“A Katy Perry song comes on, and it’s ‘Roar,’ and all of a sudden it says, ‘I am a champion,’” Scherzer said. “Like, ‘Yeah, I am a champion.’ All of a sudden, the song comes in a little bit better. It’s little moments like that where you recognize different things, what that means to win a World Series, being a champion, something we’ll always be able to say.”