One day, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer will likely be first-ballot Hall of Famers. But here’s some free advice for the folks in Cooperstown: Don’t bother prepping those plaques any time soon.
Verlander, who will turn 43 in February, intends to play next season and possibly even beyond that, as he continues his quest for 300 wins, a feat accomplished by just 24 pitchers (Verlander has 266). Scherzer, whose 42nd birthday looms in July, looked reinvigorated as a main character in the Blue Jays' epic postseason run this past fall. His main takeaway? “I can still do this,” Scherzer told The Athletic (subscription required).
Both all-time greats are still free agents. But, at different points last season, each proved they still have something left in the tank. They’ve changed with the times, too. Here’s how Verlander and Scherzer have evolved in the latest chapter of their decorated careers.
Justin Verlander
Verlander’s 20th Major League season was a weird one. He managed to stay healthy, making 29 starts for the Giants, and posted a 3.85 ERA that neatly matched his 3.85 FIP. But those figures belie the complete picture, because Verlander’s 2025 campaign is best split into two.
- First 16 starts: 4.99 ERA // 4.29 FIP // 18.9% strikeout rate
- Last 13 starts: 2.60 ERA // 3.36 FIP // 22.8% strikeout rate
In a nine-week span from late July through the end of the 2025 season, Verlander performed like one of the best pitchers in baseball. Only six starters had a lower ERA. Verlander’s FIP (3.36) was even better than Tarik Skubal’s (3.39).
But this wasn’t vintage Verlander: It was a version different from any we’ve seen before. For so long, the right-hander overwhelmed hitters with a rising fastball at the top of the zone. It is one of the defining pitches of his era. Verlander is responsible for three of the highest single-season run value totals on four-seam fastballs in the Statcast Era (since 2015). Beyond any metric, the fastball elevates the rest of Verlander’s arsenal: He spins his curveball and snaps his slider off the heater on a north-to-south plane.
Last season, Verlander’s fastball allowed a .279/.480 BA/SLG combination and posted a negative run value. It looked beatable, and advanced pitching models helped validate what we were seeing. Stuff+ rates it a below-average pitch, accounting for factors like velocity and movement.
Verlander threw his four-seamer just 45.3% of the time last year, the lowest single-season usage rate of his career. In July, he threw four-seamers at a 41.1% clip, his lowest in a month since April 2008, the first month in the pitch-tracking era.
It’s a reasonable spot to have an identity crisis: Who is Verlander without an elite fastball? But the change was necessary.
“Guys are able to execute their game plan against me too easily,” Verlander told The San Francisco Standard on July 5. “I can’t quite get fastballs by guys when I should be able to. ... I’m just not deceptive enough right now, and I need to figure out how to blend stuff better. Mechanically, I’m not delivering the pitch the way I’m capable of to deceive the hitter.”
The idea of deceiving the hitter is something that Verlander mentioned throughout the season. On July 9, he observed that “hitters have been seeing the ball a little early on me.” The following month, on August 17, he said any success is “just a matter of finding my deception.”
Deception is tricky to quantify, in part because there are so many ways a pitcher can try to be more deceptive. Verlander took a stab at a few of them. In July, he moved towards the third-base side of the rubber, and maybe that new positioning created better angles from which to attack hitters. Or, maybe hitters had a harder time seeing the ball after Verlander made a mechanical change to pull the ball from his glove earlier in his motion. We don’t know for sure. But there are two components of deception that we can, in part, measure with Statcast.
For one, Verlander added a new pitch, incorporating a sweeping version of his signature slider. It’s an interesting addition, because sweepers are typically maximized by pitchers who throw from lower slots and have an easier time producing outlier horizontal movement. That’s not Verlander, who touts one of the game’s truly extreme overhand arm angles. No one throws a sweeper from a higher release point than Verlander.
As such, Verlander’s sweeper is unlike anything most hitters have seen before. Batters hit just .053 with a .136 expected BA against the pitch, which overtook his curveball as his third option to right-handed batters.
Verlander also continued to raise his arm slot. By September, he released his fastball from 7.2 feet high (the Major League average is 5.9 feet).
The slew of changes does coincide with Verlander’s success. Whether this is sustainable is another question. He told The San Francisco Standard that his arm angle climbed too high in 2024, to the point where his body wasn’t moving naturally, which led to a physical breakdown. He ended the 2025 season releasing the ball from an even higher point.
Verlander, even at 43, will continue to adapt as necessary.
Max Scherzer
Between a lingering thumb injury and poor performance -- including a 5.19 ERA and 4.99 FIP -- Scherzer’s 2025 season was forgettable. But when the ALCS rolled around, the Blue Jays needed a fourth starter. After being left off the roster for the ALDS, “Mad Max” returned to the limelight with his patented fury.
Scherzer allowed a total of six runs in three postseason starts. At one point, he threw his fastest pitch in two years, a 96.5 mph four-seamer, and his average fastball velocity (94.6 mph) was up a full tick from the regular season. His slider and curveball both generated swing-and-miss at high rates. He wasn’t overpowering, but he showed that he can still pitch.
At this point in his career, Scherzer is reliant on plus command. He’s in the strike zone more than most pitchers, with a 52.9% zone rate, even though his stuff is not what it used to be; Stuff+ grades every pitch but his slider as below average. He’s never missed fewer bats, with a 23.6% whiff rate down a full eight percentage points from his career average.
To succeed like this, you have to hit your spots. Mistakes will be punished: Scherzer’s barrel rate against was in the second percentile last season. But he knows where he wants his pitches, with a heavy diet of fastballs up and sliders low and away. Last season, Scherzer was in the shadow zone (defined by Statcast as the area around the edges of the strike zone) on 45.5% of his total pitches. That was one of the highest rates among starting pitchers. No one located their slider in the shadow zone more than Scherzer, who did so 48.3% of the time.
“You’ve got to find the zone with all your pitches,” Scherzer told himself ahead of his ALCS Game 4 start.
It takes a certain amount of gumption to pepper the zone, and no one will argue that Scherzer is short on confidence. Here’s what he said in August, after a start against the Cubs:
“Strike one, locate it, get the ball where you want it,” Scherzer said, outlining his gameplan. “It’s OK if they swing at it.”
Like Verlander, Scherzer has adjusted his mix and changed his arm slot, too. While Verlander threw his fastball less, Scherzer did the opposite. His 48.5% usage rate on the four-seamer was his highest single-season mark since 2019. By run value, it was his best pitch, at a +4. It has a different shape, with less horizontal movement than usual, because Scherzer’s arm angle has crept up to 33 degrees.
Scherzer also threw his slider 23.7% of the time, tied for his highest single-season rate.
As Blue Jays manager John Schneider summarized in the ALCS: “He’s 41 and he’s still working on his craft.”