QUEENS — Mets ace Max Scherzer still isn’t quite where he wants to be, but five scoreless innings against a dangerous San Diego Padres lineup while allowing just one hit with six strikeouts on Monday night certainly won’t hurt in what he admitted was “a step in the right direction.”
The 38-year-old veteran right-hander’s bounce back was a necessary one in the Mets’ 5-0 victory over San Diego after he was shelled by the Milwaukee Brewers on April 4, allowing five runs on eight hits with four home runs while striking out only two. It bloated his season ERA at the time to 6.35.
Scherzer lamented that it was his inability to put Brewers batters away with two strikes, as evident by Brian Anderson and Garrett Mitchell’s consecutive home runs — which capped off a rare back-to-back-to-back barrage against the future Hall-of-Famer — that came with two strikes.
“I self-diagnosed that right. I’m not broken,” Scherzer said. “I wasn’t broken after the Milwaukee start. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. I just had to fine-tune some things. That’s baseball.”
Monday night against the Padres saw Scherzer reclaim control of his secondary pitches, most notably his changeup, which had “good shape” to it. Yet the location of all his pitches, especially his fastball, isn’t exactly where he wants it to be just yet.
Describing it as a “case of the just-misses,” Scherzer walked three Padres in the first three innings to rack up his pitch count. That inability to pinpoint the spots he wanted some of his pitches to go attributed to why it took 97 pitches to go five innings, which ultimately led to him getting the hook earlier than he would have liked.
“I was just missing with that fastball and it got me in some bad counts,” Scherzer said. “That allowed them to grind me apart. That’s why my pitch count got high.”
The obvious difference from Monday to last week in Milwaukee, though, is that Scherzer was able to bear down enough to not let up the “big hit,” or many hits for that matter. Ha-Seong Kim broke up his no-hitter in the fifth with a clean single to center that ultimately didn’t threaten coming across to score.
That’s because Scherzer stuck to his mechanics.
“You don’t try to over-correct for [the just-misses],” he said. “There were times I was spraying the fastball a little bit but there were also times when I’m hitting the spot but just missing by a couple inches. You’d rather miss a couple inches of where you’re trying to intend to hit the target than let it leak back over the middle.
“If you overcorrect it, you can run into some mistakes.”
That appears to be Scherzer’s M.O. There’s a reason why he’s the ace of a Mets team with World Series aspirations and a future Hall-of-Famer.
“If you follow the results, you could make yourself go crazy at times,” he said. “You have to be able to reflect on what’s actually happening and know how you’re getting beat. I thought I identified the right things to do and I made better pitches because of that.
“I know what I’m capable of. I know what I’m capable of when I pitch and locate. Getting off in 2023, I think I can continue to get better and keep grinding and find mid-season form.”
