It Isn’t Over Until Max Scherzer Says It Is

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.

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