There’s no denying that Max Scherzer is one of the best pitchers in baseball. He has the numbers, the no-hitters, the Cy Young, even the contract. He’s probably going to win another Cy Young in November too.
But sports these days are increasingly measured by how you perform in the postseason. You can be a historically dominant pitcher in the regular season but if you’re not just as good in the postseason, people will quickly and happily shrug off the regular-season numbers. Right, Clayton Kershaw?
So while the two no-hitters and the $210 million contract the Washington Nationals gave Scherzer two winters ago are nice, he could reaffirm his place among baseball’s most celebrated arms in Game 5 of the National League Division Series on Thursday night.
The stakes are higher than he’s ever faced: A do-or-die for both the Nats and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Loser goes home, winner goes to the face the Chicago Cubs in the NLCS.
“This is probably the biggest start of my career, the biggest start of my life,” Scherzer told reporters in D.C. on Wednesday, including MLB.com’s Anthony DiComo. “How you handle that, going out there and using the emotion of that scenario that everything’s on the line — look, I’m not going to shy away from it. This is the biggest start of my career.”
This isn’t a Kershaw situation. Scherzer isn’t trying to expel the ghosts of rough postseasons past. He’s pitched well in the past, but what he doesn’t have is a defining moment. He doesn’t have the game you’ll look back at and say, “Remember when Max Scherzer absolutely dominated that one and won the series?” Postseason Madison Bumgarner, he is not.
His moment sure wasn’t Game 1 in this series, in which he faced Kershaw and pitched six innings, allowing four runs, striking out five and allowing two homers. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great. But everybody would forget about it in Game 5 turned into one of the dominant Scherzer starts we’ve gotten used to seeing in the regular season.
Ten times this season Scherzer pitched into the seventh inning, allowing either zero or one runs. Thirteen times this season he struck out more than 10 batters in a game.
The postseason is a different beast, which we all know. In 11 starts, Scherzer is 3-3 with a 3.93 ERA. Again, not bad and not great. Three times he’s struck out more than 10 hitters. Thus far, Scherzer’s postseason modus operandi is strong performances in early series games the being on the wrong side of clinchers.
His best postseason start came in Game 2 of the 2013 ALCS when he was pitching for the Detroit Tigers against the Boston Red Sox. He struck out 13, allowed two hits and one run. But it was Game 2 of a seven-game series that his team eventually lost. In fact, it was Scherzer who started and took the loss in Game 6 of that series, which the Red Sox won with a four-run seventh inning to advance to the World Series.
And it was Scherzer who started Game 4 of the 2012 World Series against the San Francisco Giants, in which the Giants finished the sweep of the Tigers. Scherzer can’t be blamed for that one, necessarily. The Giants won on a 10th-inning single off reliever Phil Coke.
Now Scherzer finds himself in the decisive game of a back-and-forth series, a series in which both teams have depended on their bullpens more than they’d like. If ever there were a good time for Max Scherzer to create his great postseason moment, this is it.
No comments:
Post a Comment