Max Scherzer, for all eternity | Baseball prospectus

Translated by Marco Gámez

Starting pitchers aren’t that different from actors. Preparation requires a level of dedication, immersion, that forces one to become immersed in one’s work. They have done everything they can, until all that remains is the task before us, the role that must be played. Some launch vehicles, and some actorsthey give themselves more fully than others. Before starting Game 4, his first in three weeks, Max Scherzer followed his usual methodgesticulating, effervescent, and showing no sign that three weeks had passed since he last stood on a Major League mound. It was very easy to forget why, to replace the man on the mound with the Max Scherzer that fans have long remembered.

Thursday night could have been the final start of Max Scherzer’s career, and if it was, what a way to say goodbye. If not, it was a great way to say goodbye too. It wasn’t exactly a performance that took you back in time: the intensity of that look was tempered by the graying beard, the curves dodging the bats but not letting the knees buckle. The fastball struggled to find the zone; Sometimes it seemed like he had never done it before, like he was trying it out on the practice fields. He was neither humble nor heroic. He just threw well, like a younger, talented, but lethal pitcher would.

At the same time, it will not be the last start of Max Scherzer’s career, because there will be no last start in Max Scherzer’s career. In that sense it also comes from a different era, a time when television series did not end, they were simply canceled. Even if the Blue Jays don’t advance, or they may, if they use him as a reliever for Game 4, he’ll enter, in a sort of hasty pick, the purgatorial stage that all free agents of a certain age live in, active and inactive at the same time. He’ll be a pitcher, and there will always, always be a team that needs pitchers. Sometimes they don’t pay for it, sometimes they do, but the elbow fails. But the possibility, that feeling of attraction, will always be there. Especially among the pitchers, no one disappears completely, and by the time retirement is formally announced, they exist only in memory: 34, 37, 41, forever.

Certainly, the chances of a storybook ending or not ending seemed slim Thursday afternoon. The Blue Jays had cut the future Hall of Famer from their American League Division Series roster after a very poor September in which he allowed 17 runs in 15 painful innings. Initially, when they added him, they simply said he would be “involved” in Game 4. Not that his chances improved much early, missing seven consecutive pitches, getting two on base before getting out of trouble with a double play, and then giving up a home run to lead into the next inning, the main symptom of his decline. But just like Shane Bieber After his poor start the night before, Scherzer had settled down, and Scherzer was also struggling, but threw just the right number of pitches, avoided solid contact (the Mariners hit only two line drives, both of which were zero) and made that desperate two-strike swing on a curveball buried in the mud. If he was no longer a legend, he could make his rivals so afraid of him for one night.

Meanwhile, behind him, the Blue Jays were methodically dismantling Seattle’s sense of invulnerability. This time there was no sudden five-run knockout; It was crueler than that. Instead, Toronto dismantled the opponents inning after inning, scoring with home runs, doubles, a wild pitch and a single that was deflected by the pitcher. The dominance was absolute and unavoidable: the baseball equivalent of getting hit from behind and having your body dragged into an alley. The stadium itself was transforming. Two hours from the border, the Blue Jays have always had a good fan base among the residents of Vancouver, British Columbia, who found their way to the stadium through the ticketing market. As the men in light blue silenced the home side for the second night in a row, the visitors took over the space, to the point where, as the attack began to increase in the late innings, it was no longer clear who the crowd belonged to. They roared loudly when Seranthony Domínguez struck out Dominic Song to end the game, half celebrating, and the other half relieved that it was all over.

Starting pitchers are not that different from actors, in that they and their characters are very often intertwined. Max Scherzer and Mad Max are different people who share the same body, but their fates are aligned, and when we see them, we see them both. So it was fitting that Mad Max gave his own final farewell, shouting at the manager Johannes Schneider when he came in with two outs in the fifth inning to try to take the ball away from him. It wasn’t his hardest fight, Scherzer only had 72 throws and the equalizer was barely visible in the on-deck circle, but it was a pleasure to seeas if Peter Falk is spinning on his heel for the sixtieth time with one finger up. We all know how it ends, but we’d like to see it again. It’s reassuring.

Scherzer looked at his boss, the crowd, and pulled the tendons in his aging right arm. And after he had defeated them all, he turned around Randy Arozarena and he struck out on four pitches, the last of which was a slider that deflected out of the zone with such malice that it escaped the glove of the ball. Alejandro Kirk and rolled over the grass in the field. It was a live ball, but neither the runner nor the receiver moved frozen as the rest of the players rushed to the dugout. Oblivious to everything, the music in the stadium sounded on time. Finally, Arozarena walked away. Scherzer and Mad Max saw none of that; they cursed into the night air as they walked away, the scene now complete.