There’s a video that made the rounds last year. You probably saw it. It’s an accidental time capsule, a transportive flicker of lo-fi, 2008 broadcast graphic work that captured a changing of the guard with dramatic irony that could only be recognized decades down the line.
“Originally scheduled pitchers,” it said, over thumbnail photos of 44-year-old Randy Johnson and 42-year-old Greg Maddux. Then, with a barely perceptible fade, the video flips to “today’s starters.”
Clayton Kershaw, 20 years old, against Max Scherzer, 24 and still sitting on zero career wins.
Scherzer has 214 of them now, along with three Cy Young Awards and two World Series rings. At age 39, he is working in the minor leagues, pushing to start his first full season with the Rangers in earnest next week following offseason back surgery and a second rehab start on Friday night. It’s the first time in his career he wasn’t available for Opening Day, and 2024 figures to be just his second full season with fewer than 25 starts.
Simultaneously the eldest, most rugged, and most magnetic of the Rangers’ stable of rehabbing starters, Scherzer will have a huge say in determining how serious a title defense Texas mounts. It will also tell us something significant about where he stands on his own illustrious timeline. Is he prepared to embark on a new era and sear himself into the 1080p digital fabric of future seasons? Or is he retreating into the legacy act phase, a comparison point to something, or someone, as yet unknown?
The fuzz of the 2008 video feels right when you see the names that paced the same station as Scherzer back then. Unpunched tickets in hand, prospects like David Price, Chris Davis, and Evan Longoria mingled in suspense alongside Taylor Teagarden, Michael Main, and Chorye Spoone. All were given equal or better billing than Scherzer.
What makes Scherzer’s path so remarkable, and his next act so intriguing, is not just the success—which is Cooperstown inner circle stuff—but the way his career has intertwined with his generation in the game.
There are the broad connections to the game’s trajectory. He signed one of the most successful free agent deals of all time. He was a vocal leader during the negotiations around the 2022 lockout. He has been a lightning rod and a bellwether for the sport’s strategic evolution, from his embrace of secondary pitches to his grudging acceptance of PitchCom and his sticky stuff suspension.
There are his iconoclastic trademarks. The 20-strikeout game. The thunderous mound demeanor. The heterochromia. The maniacal attention to detail. The seven shutout innings with a broken nose. The gutty effort to overcome neck spasms and pitch in in the Washington Nationals’ victory over the Houston Astros in Game 7 of the 2019 World Series.
But more than anything else, there are his connections to the other main characters in this chapter of baseball history. According to Baseball-Reference WAR, Scherzer has been teammates with eight of the 13 best pitchers who debuted in 2008 or 2009, and that number could reach nine should recent Rangers signee Johnny Cueto make it back to the majors. He has shared a rotation with each of the other three pitchers in that cohort who have claimed the Cy Young.
Scherzer’s identity has morphed alongside his environment. He went from the wild card who wasn’t viewed as the best pitcher on his own team—even in Detroit, the site of his first Cy Young, where he was often the second chair to Justin Verlander—to the ferocious, motivating leading man in Washington. He was a professorial veteran in New York, a big-name mercenary in Los Angeles, and to some extent, in his whirlwind landing with Texas.
All the while, he has been defying expectations and often the apparent limits of his own body. As New York Times-turned-Athletic scribe Tyler Kepner accurately guessed years ago, Scherzer dons No. 31 in homage to Greg Maddux. Back in 2019, I wrote about Scherzer’s mastery of his early 30s and the parallels to Maddux, who aged and adapted as well as just about anyone in the annals of pitching—with Johnson, his would-be opposite number in that impromptu Kershaw-Scherzer matchup, being the stiffest competition.
Despite a few more injury hurdles in recent years, Scherzer has largely held up that superhuman trajectory. I split the careers of starting pitchers into five-season chunks by age range, minimum 100 starts per span, from 1961 on, to see how Scherzer ranks by ERA+, a park- and era-adjusted metric where 100 is average and 110 means the pitcher was 10 percent better than league average.
You can see how Scherzer bubbles up from good to elite with time.
Age 25 to 29: 117 ERA+, 94th (tied) out of 491
Age 30 to 34: 156 ERA+, fifth out of 261
Age 35 to 39: 140 ERA+, third (tied) out of 84 (with a lower minimum of 80 games started)
The Rangers don’t need Scherzer to go full Maddux or full Big Unit from here on out. Even if he did, there’s nothing tying him to Texas beyond this season. But to understand Scherzer is to know his drive.
In 2015, fresh off signing a monumental contract, Scherzer told the Washington Post that “having success on the mound is my number one motivation and, for the most part, my only motivation.” The last time he was coming off a World Series win, in 2020, he was also rebounding from back problems, albeit non-surgical ones. His methods for overcoming the concerns an aging body might inspire?
“Whenever you let doubt creep in about whatever it is, you have to be really good about flipping it,” he told Yahoo Sports’ Hannah Keyser. “Come up with a new narrative.”
And his method for staying motivated after reaching the sport’s pinnacle? Well, it was as simple as putting a baseball back in his hand.
Even though he might be the pitcher best situated to roll out a Taylor Swift-style tour of his various eras, or saunter through the motions resting on his laurels, Scherzer might also be the least likely human on Earth to consider such an option. Where Verlander has often struck a Tom Brady-esque pose with his ambitious longevity goals, where Kershaw has repeatedly stuck with the Dodgers (even if he’s still a Dallas guy at heart) and cooperated on a biography, Scherzer has provided no indication he’s even aware of the fact that his Hall of Fame plaque has been mostly written.
Wild card, leading man, savior, professor—Scherzer rarely sees himself as anything other than “probable pitcher.”
He has something more specific than tunnel vision — standardized test vision, art museum vision. The task directly in front of him matters immensely, and he will expound upon it in detail. Ask how his slider played in last night’s start, you might get a 10-minute answer; ask about his legacy, you’d be lucky to get 10 words.
So in true Scherzer fashion, let’s go granular. At 38, Scherzer had difficulties with his slider for the first time in more than a decade. It got hit hard, and contributed to a home run problem. It improved in Texas, but the level of Scherzer’s success will depend on how his slider and cutter play. The four-seam fastball still has good shape, but it dropped under 94 mph on average for the first time in 2023, and it’s probably not going back. Signals around the league would encourage Scherzer to lean on those pitches more, perhaps shaving his four-seam usage down to the 40 percent mark or lower—no small ask considering his career low, set in 2022, is 45.4 percent.
The FanGraphs depth chart projections for the rest of the season forecast a 3.90 ERA, which would rank just outside the top 40 among all MLB pitchers charted for 100 or more innings the rest of the way. His K-BB%, on the other hand, would rank 10th among that group. As has often been the case with Scherzer, home runs look like both a bugaboo and the only consistent way to score off him. All of that is in line with his overall performance last year.
That might not sound overly rosy, but if the playing time on those projections is accurate—115 innings across 20 starts—the system would chart Scherzer as the most valuable pitcher on the Rangers’ roster, a significant upgrade over Andrew Heaney, Dane Dunning, and Michael Lorenzen however the rotation shakes out.
The picture will get much clearer once Scherzer rounds into form and the data comes in on his stuff. Is it still relatively stable from previous seasons? Is his back holding up to max effort?
Then it will be a matter of maintenance, a matter of helping the future Hall of Famer manage his workload and adjust his arsenal to match a body that has been doing this since HD meant something very different than it does today. It will mean forging ahead into a new era, even if Scherzer himself doesn’t recognize anything changing at all.
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