What do these Mets talk about in the dugout?

This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo’s Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

The scene is as predictable as any at Citi Field: Chris Bassitt walks off the mound, heads to the dugout and quickly moves to wherever Max Scherzer is standing. Or Scherzer finishes his start and immediately finds Bassitt.

If one just finished pitching, there’s a good chance he’ll soon be standing right next to the other.

“He’s a very deep thinker,” Bassitt said in explanation of their lengthy dugout chats. “We’ve meshed really well in that aspect.”

The midgame conversations began in part because Bassitt, upon being traded to the Mets in March, made it his stated goal to soak up as much knowledge from Cy Young winners Scherzer and Jacob deGrom as possible. Early this season, with deGrom absent, Scherzer filled the void with a constant stream of wisdom. Now that all three are healthy, they’re often in the dugout exchanging ideas with each other, as well as with fellow rotation members Carlos Carrasco and Taijuan Walker. And while Scherzer and Bassitt don’t operate in quite the same manner, both are five-pitch pitchers who try to attack hitters in cerebral ways.

“The biggest thing I want to know is what has made Max be so successful for so long,” Bassitt said earlier this season. “He’s … 38 years old, and he’s still one of the best in the world. I think that’s the thing that I admire the most of it all, and that’s what I’m striving to be.”

This is not, however, a one-way conversation. Far from it. Despite all his success, Scherzer enjoys picking Bassitt’s brain about what he saw from certain matchups, how he would have attacked certain hitters and other concepts fresh in their minds after starts. It’s similar to the relationship Scherzer enjoyed in Detroit and Washington with Aníbal Sánchez -- another starter who threw nothing like him, but who viewed the art of pitching in similar ways.

“It’s really just to get a download of what happened in certain situations and identify mistakes that we both make every single time out,” Scherzer said of his conversations with Bassitt. “He has a good pitching mind as well. Getting his perspective on how he uses his pitches in certain situations, that’s the fun of it. Because even though we’ve got some similarities between us, he’s very different with how he attacks guys. That’s what makes it fun to watch him.”

Of course, Scherzer and Bassitt discuss far more than just pitching in their dugout chats. The two have become fast friends over the course of the season, in large part because each describes the other as a maniacal competitor. Earlier this year in the weight room, Scherzer outleaped Bassitt on a box jump test and, in Bassitt’s words, “he was letting me have it.”

Bassitt, who enjoys playing ping-pong on the clubhouse table, tried to get even by inviting Scherzer to play with him. The veteran refused.

“He said he won’t do that,” Bassitt recalled, laughing, “because he’ll be obsessive over it.”