Scherzer 'brings it,' even on back fields

JUPITER, Fla. --- Soon you would be able to hear the national anthem in the distance from inside Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium, and the Mets’ game against the Marlins would be starting. But out here on a back field, a few minutes after 1 o’clock, Max Scherzer was getting ready to get in his own work against some of the Marlins’ Minor League hitters.

Tylor Megill, a big guy who could turn out to be a big pitcher for Buck Showalter with some pitcher injuries mounting, would throw four shutout innings against the Marlins with the wind blowing out at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium, and he continue to give himself a shot at being Showalter’s No. 5 starter. The decision had been made to stretch him out against the Marlins’ big club with the start of the regular season just over two weeks away, just down the Florida Turnpike in Miami against this same Marlins team.

But Scherzer, who is at the top of Buck’s rotation, along with his old friend, Justin Verlander -- they are 1 and 1A, the “A” standing for aces -- needed to get his own work in on this day. So here he was, right before 1 o’clock, pacing in front of the Mets' bench as if he were in the dugout at Citi Field, fussing with a rosin bag, talking and talking, mostly to himself.

Showalter would miss the first inning of Mets vs. Marlins to come out and watch Scherzer’s bottom of the first back here. There was no pitch timer on the back field, even though Scherzer would work fast anyway. A tour bus was parked behind some palm trees on the other side of the right-field fence. But Scherzer was ready to go.

Showalter got out of a golf cart, already smiling. There aren’t many players Buck Showalter has ever managed who he liked managing more than he does Max Scherzer.

“Look at him,” Showalter said. “He’s gonna be 39 years old [in July], and every game for him, even back here, is like his first day of Little League.”

Scherzer was here to throw at least 70 pitches, fastballs and breaking balls, getting a couple of called third strikes, one with a fastball on the inside corner, another with a breaking ball on the outside corner. He would watch one wind-blown ball drop over the wire fence in left. But even on a back field in the middle of March, even facing mostly Minor Leaguers, with only a few fans standing between this field and the one next to it, you still knew you were watching Max Scherzer.

Before he’d left the visitors’ clubhouse, Showalter asked if he was worried about what shape the mound might be in.

“Is there a pitching rubber?” Scherzer asked him. “Are there going to be hitters? Just gimme the ball.”

Afterward Scherzer would talk about how it was a “challenge” pitching in circumstances like that, but he understands by now that he won’t always be pitching in front of a full house once the season does start on March 30. Pitching, he said, is pitching.

“You’ve still got to bring it,” Scherzer told reporters, ice on his shoulder.

He was brilliant last year for the Mets when he was healthy. But he was not always healthy, only making 23 starts because of time on the injured list with a left oblique injury. His record in those 23 starts was 11-5, with a 2.29 ERA, and even in the season when he turned 38, he struck out 173 batters in 145 1/3 innings. He was Max.

But he didn’t finish the way he had started. There were two games at the end -- one his last regular-season start against the Braves in Atlanta, when the Mets still had their chance to win the NL East and not have to play a Wild Card Series, then one against the Padres the first weekend of the postseason -- when he wasn’t vintage Max.

Against the Padres in Game 1, he left in the fifth inning after having given up seven runs. Jacob deGrom won Game 2, but then Chris Bassitt didn’t have his own best stuff in Game 3, and just like that, the Mets’ season was over.

Now deGrom is in Texas. Verlander, who won another Cy Young Award last season for the Astros, has come to New York to replace him. It is Verlander and Scherzer now, the way it was once the two of them in Jim Leyland’s rotation with the Tigers, at the start of it for both of them. What will surely be Hall of Fame careers has seen them win a combined total of six Cy Young Awards and three World Series and one MVP (Verlander), now it has them at Citi Field.

Max Scherzer was a long way from Citi Field on Monday afternoon. You could still see he was having a blast. Like the first day of Little League. One more of those for Max Scherzer. Just give him the ball.