Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, who have six Cy Young Awards between them and three World Series titles and one MVP (Verlander’s), were signed by the Mets for big money this season, and to pitch big games in August and September and into October. Now they are doing exactly that. Just not for the Mets.
Scherzer won again for the Rangers on Tuesday night. He allowed just one run on three hits to the A's. It means he’s now 2-0 since the Rangers traded for him, with 15 strikeouts in 13 innings and four earned runs allowed. Scherzer had just turned 39 before the Mets traded him. Now he tries to turn back the clock in Texas and maybe pitch himself back into one more World Series.
His new manager, Bruce Bochy, described Scherzer’s performance in Oakland as “beautiful.”
Scherzer’s old manager with the Mets, Buck Showalter, isn’t surprised. This isn’t the kind of late-summer race he imagined, either for him or for Scherzer this season. But Buck is happy for him. Mostly it is because he enjoyed his time with Max Scherzer -- what he jokingly calls “The Max Experience,” as much as any he’s ever had in baseball -- and Buck has had a lot of them, including with the Texas Rangers once.
“Absolutely one of my all-time favorites,” Buck said on Wednesday. “Max is an open book, blunt and honest, and I mean blatantly honest. He’s not always right, even when he thinks he is. But I can’t tell you how much fun it was debating him, about almost anything. I think because people can see how intense he is, on the mound and in the dugout. They get the idea he might be hard to manage, but the fact is, he was a joy to manage. I love the guy.”
Buck talked about what he described as Scherzer’s “plop downs” in his office, from all the times in Spring Training, across the last regular season and this one until Scherzer was traded, when Scherzer would come into the manager’s office and shut the door behind him and just want to talk.
“He just wanted to talk shop,” Showalter said. “He might start out talking about something like Missouri football, but before long, he’s into the virtues of his grip on his slider.
"Almost all of the time, it would start out the same way. He’d say, ‘OK, what you got?’ Then we’d just kick things around, about whatever happened to be on his mind that day. And every time he was sitting across from me, I’d remember something Angela [Buck’s wife] used to say when our kids were little. She’d tell me, ‘All they want is your time.’”
Showalter paused and said, “There are a lot of reasons why I enjoyed managing him as much as I did. But those talks were one of them.”
Scherzer ended up making just 42 starts for Showalter. He was 11-5 in 2022 around injuries to his side and his oblique. At the end, even after the Mets won the same 101 regular-season games that the Braves did, Scherzer lost to the Braves at the end of September when a win would have won the Mets the National League East, then lost to the Padres in the first round of the playoffs. Both were the kinds of games Scherzer had been hired to win.
This season, there were back issues for him, and a 10-game suspension after being thrown out of a Mets-Dodgers game because his pitching hand, the umpires determined, was way too sticky. He still managed to have a 9-4 record before leaving for the Rangers at the Trade Deadline. So his Mets’ legacy will always be complicated. Just not for his manager.
“He never shied away from competition,” Showalter said on Wednesday. “There was never any false hustle, or bravado. He always wanted to pitch against the other team’s No. 1 guy. He was always asking me to figure out the rotation so that he could go up against their best.”
Showalter paused again.
“I really wish everybody could see him on just one work day,” he said. “I know I wasn’t getting Max in his prime. But I loved him on the day he pitched. So did his teammates. No one playing behind him ever wanted to disappoint him. They all wanted to be better on the day Max Scherzer pitched.”
The last sit-down in Buck’s office was the day before Scherzer officially left the Mets. Showalter talked about how emotional it was for both of them. Then Scherzer went to the Rangers and gave up three runs in the first inning he pitched for them against the White Sox. But he got out of the inning and then did turn back the clock after that, finally striking out nine batters in six innings and getting his first win in Texas. Now he is 2-0 there after beating the A’s on Tuesday.
Scherzer started out the season with one veteran manager. Now he’s got another one in Bochy. It’s not the season Scherzer expected. Just the one with which he’s ended up, a long way from New York, pitching the kind of big games in Texas this season he was supposed to pitch for Buck.