Pitchers are a kooky breed: superstitious, hypercompetitive, quite often a little bit nuts. It's a personality type that shares a lot with kickers and goalies in other sports. The common threads? First, they have an awful lot of downtime to spend in their own heads. Second, they are, to an extent, competing with themselves—out there all alone, with nothing but their own limitations to battle. Deprived of the warmth of human interaction, sometimes they go downright feral. Whatever works.
It's worked for Max Scherzer, you'd have to say. Three Cy Youngs, eight all-star appearances, two championship rings, ninth all-time in strikeouts. He got all that hardware by being a real freak. Stalking around the mound after a strikeout like a caged tiger. Warning off managers who might even consider taking him out of a game by activating the threat display of an alarmed hagfish crossed with a territorial canid. "He’s snarling, snot is coming out his mouth, he’s drooling and steam is coming out his ears, his eyes are bloodshot," recalls one teammate, "and he goes: 'You better get in the fucking dugout right now. Don’t you fucking dare come out here.'"
Scherzer finished off his 19th season on Sunday as a member of the Blue Jays, and if it was an atypical season for the future hall-of-famer, it was quite in line with what you'd expect from a 42-year-old. It was rough, in other words. Scherzer hasn't officially decided on retirement, but with a lockout looming he's talking about it like he has, and anyway he's not returning to Toronto. "We had circled this one, if we were out of it, to still pitch Sunday. It gives me a chance to pitch in front of my kids one more time," he said. It didn't matter that Scherzer would have to throw on short rest. It did matter, though he wouldn't admit it, that he still had a puncher's chance of chasing down Justin Verlander on the all-time strikeout list, after Verlander had returned from six months on the shelf to make one last start the day before.
We got vintage Scherzer. Seven-plus innings of one-run ball, striking out seven Cincinnati Reds. While he couldn't reel in Verlander, it certainly wasn't for a lack of trying, or a lack of psychosis. In the seventh inning, manager John Schneider made the long, slow walk to the mound, the crowd's booing growing louder all the while. A disbelieving smirk crossed Scherzer's lips. Schneider smiled too: This wasn't a real mound visit. This was a cue. Schneider was there to give Scherzer and the crowd what they wanted: one last chance for Scherzer to order his manager off his mound and back to the dugout. Shades of last fall's ALCS. The crowd went nuts.
When Schneider pulled Scherzer for real one inning later, the mood had turned valedictory. Scherzer hugged his skipper, and Schneider told him, "Thank you for letting me be part of your unbelievable career, and I wouldn’t want any other 42-year-old psychopath on my team other than you.”
Scherzer hugged everyone in the dugout, and then when he ran out of teammates, he hopped into the stands to embrace his wife and kids. Great stuff all around: perfectly managed theater, but with the twist unique to sports that the celebration had to be set up by actual, unscripted accomplishment from an old dog digging deep for just one more dominant start, one more inning, one more batter. And no manager was going to tell Max Scherzer what he had left.
