On Wednesday, Max Scherzer will face Cole DeVries, a 27-year-old rookie for the Minnesota Twins.
Max Scherzer: Still One Of Baseball’s Weirdest Pitchers
Scherzer is a former first-round pick and top prospect. DeVries was an undrafted free agent who spent most of the last two years relieving in Double-A and Triple-A.
Scherzer usually has a fastball that sits at 95, but can touch 98. DeVries usually sits at 89/90.
Scherzer is second in baseball in strikeouts and strikeout rate. DeVries is toward the bottom of the league in strikeout rate, below Bruce Chen, Kevin Millwood, and Kyle Kendrick
Max Scherzer has a 4.65 ERA. Cole DeVries has a 4.77 ERA. The two very different pitchers use their different styles, talents, and backgrounds to allow runs at about the same rate.
It's 2012, and we've moved on from ERA. There's FIP, xFIP, and SIERA. We know that pitchers generally don't have a lot of control over what happens after a hitter makes contact, so the goal should be to find a pitcher who doesn't let hitters make contact. A lot of those new stats are based on that assumption, and according to them, Scherzer is the bee's knees: the fourth-best starter in baseball according to SIERA, and the eight-best in the American League according to xFIP; according to the latter stat, just a tenth of a run worse than teammate Justin Verlander.
In the real world, Scherzer allows runs like Cole DeVries.
There are two easy-to-spot reasons: Home runs and batting average on balls in play. As in, Scherzer allows a lot of home runs (21 this year) and when hitters do make contact, they hit safely more often than expected (.358 batting average on balls in play -- worst among qualified starters).
The home runs might be a fluke, or they might be an absence of homer-suppressing talent. The xFIP numbers up there are based on a normalized home-run rate, which means Scherzer would be one of the better pitchers in the league if he had a normal home-run rate. Sure, you might think, and if he had a flux capacitor in his sternum, he’d be a time machine. But a 32-start season is more prone to sample-size chicanery than you might think. Two seasons of below-average home-run prevention doesn’t have to be a trend.
The BABIP might be a fluke, or it might have something to do with Prince Fielder and Miguel Cabrera in the same infield. But while you'd figure that could hurt a sinkerballer like Rick Porcello, Scherzer is a fly-ball pitcher. He doesn't seem the type to be victimized over and over again by grounders just out of the third baseman's reach.
Or Max Scherzer could just be a shinier, flashier Cole DeVries.
Scherzer is 28 years old. Sometimes it feels like he’s a prospect who’ll burst upon the scene at any moment, but he’s fast approaching wily veteran status. Yet somehow, he’s still one of the most enigmatic pitchers in baseball. My instinct is to say this is an anomaly, that his true talent level is closer to his FIP from the last two seasons. He’ll get better.
But when you look at pitchers who have struggled while striking out three times as many hitters as they've walked over the last 12 seasons, a lot of the same names pop up. Ricky Nolasco never got better. James Shields goes back and forth between dominant and mediocre.
So don’t ask me about Scherzer. All I know is that he’s at the outer reaches of the statistical models. I don’t know if it’s him breaking the model, or if it’s poor luck breaking him. Come back in a couple of years, and we’ll probably have an answer. Unless we don’t.
He sure can throw some pretty pitches, though.
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