Scherzer has been worth every penny for Nats

Sometimes there are dream moments and matchups in baseball, even before we have gotten through the first week of the season. So you better believe we were looking at one Tuesday night at Nationals Park, with Bryce Harper coming back to town as a member of the Phillies, scheduled to face Max Scherzer, who was the ace of the Nationals' staff when he and Harper were teammates.

“Round 1,” is what Scherzer called it. Harper, of course, made more money right after the start of Spring Training than any free-agent player had ever made in baseball, $330 million across 13 years. Mike Trout would get more from the Angels not long after that. But Trout wasn’t a free agent. Harper was, and got his. Now, the Phillies head into Washington and Nationals fans get a look at Harper in somebody else’s uniform. It marks the first time back for Harper, in just the second series of the year.

And guess what?

The Phillies can only hope that they will get the free-agent value out of Harper in his first four years in Philadelphia the way that the Nationals have with Scherzer, whom they signed for seven years and $210 million in January 2015, at the time, the biggest free-agent contract a starting pitcher had ever gotten. Because what Scherzer has been for the Nationals so far -- at a time when the money in baseball is bigger than ever -- is one of the three greatest free-agent starters in baseball history.

The other two are Greg Maddux and Randy Johnson.

Maddux won three National League Cy Young Awards for the Braves after they signed him and helped them win a World Series. Johnson won four Cy Young Awards for the D-backs and helped them win their only World Series in 2001.

CC Sabathia is still with the Yankees a decade after signing a pretty big deal of his own. Jon Lester helped pitch the Cubs to their first World Series title in roughly 1,000 years. David Price was a pitching star for the Red Sox as he helped them to another title last October, in the third year of his $217 million deal with the club.

Scherzer has been better than all of them in Washington. On Monday, I asked Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who was taking a break from watching his team hit home runs, where Scherzer rates with the best right-handed pitchers he has seen. Roberts had three words:

“Right behind Pedro.”

High praise, indeed. Roberts was talking about his old teammate, Pedro Martinez, who is in the Hall of Fame now, and who once had seasons in the thick of the time when performance-enhancing drugs were tainting the record books with inflated batting numbers, while he looked like a slender, magical right-handed version of Sandy Koufax.

There is still nothing riskier in baseball than a long-term free-agent contract, or long contract extension, for starting pitchers. The Dodgers are finding out with Clayton Kershaw. Jacob deGrom, who beat out Scherzer for the NL Cy Young last year because of his extraordinary 10-victory season for the Mets, just signed a five-year extension with the Mets. And you bet that he and Scherzer gave us our money's worth during their matchup on Opening Day at Nationals Park -- deGrom striking out 10, while Scherzer K'd 12 -- as if they were having a pitching game of H-O-R-S-E.

So Scherzer continues to deliver the goods for the Nationals after they gave him all that money. It is Scherzer, when you add it all up, who has consistently been the best pitcher in baseball.

He has never had an ERA higher than 3.00 in Washington. He has gone: 2.79, 2.96, 2.51 before sitting at 2.53 last season. Here are the number of starts he has made in those years: 33, 34, 31, 33. His win-loss record coming into this season was 68-32. He has never pitched fewer than 200 innings, a total of 886 with the Nationals. He has struck out 1,140 batters in those innings and got to 300 on the nose in 2018.

When you throw money at a free agent -- hitter or pitcher -- you hope and dream that they will be the same player for you, that they were when they were playing for somebody else, and playing themselves into the contract they received. The Nationals basically asked Scherzer to be the pitcher he’d been in Detroit for them.

And he has been. And more.

His last four years with the Tigers, he was 70-24 and pitched 817.1 innings, striking out 897 guys. He won an American League Cy Young Award in Detroit and now has two on the NL side with the Nationals. And it took an extraordinary season from deGrom, in rather extraordinary circumstances, to keep Scherzer from getting a third Cy Young with the Nationals in 2018.

And when it was him against deGrom on Opening Day, all Scherzer did was throw 109 pitches, give up two hits and three walks and strike out 12 guys, blowing away Mets hitters with a fastball up in the 90s, where it has always been, in both Detroit and in Washington. He’s now struck out 10 or more 83 times in his career. The next closest active starter to him is Chris Sale with 64. Scherzer doesn’t turn 35 years old until July.

When it was pointed out earlier this year after Opening Day that Scherzer had little room to make a mistake after giving up a first-inning home run, going up against deGrom, he said this:

"You’re right to assess it that way. But I felt good out there. I felt like I was executing pitches."

He has been doing that his whole big league life. He is still doing it. The star free agent everybody is always looking for -- the max guy -- is Max.