PHILADELPHIA -- Max Scherzer understands how to do things the hard way.

The first time Scherzer won a pennant, he played for a 2012 Tigers team that reached the Fourth of July with a losing record. That club, thanks in large part to Scherzer’s brilliant stretch run, played .605 ball over the second half of the season to clinch the American League Central with days to spare.

Scherzer’s second World Series team, the 2019 Nationals, famously sat 12 games under .500 in late May. Once again, a rally commenced in the early days of summer and culminated with Scherzer’s own bits of sorcery in October.

Part of the reason why the Mets signed Scherzer before last season was to draw on that experience in difficult times. The Mets’ current situation may be more dire than either of those aforementioned predicaments, considering they entered Saturday’s play with just a 15.8% dart throw of making the playoffs, according to FanGraphs calculations. Scherzer’s response to such pessimism is defiance. The team’s path to overcome those odds goes directly through him.

So it was encouraging for the Mets to watch Scherzer pitch out of trouble all afternoon during a 4-2 victory over the Phillies on Saturday, running his unbeaten streak to eight starts while helping the team win for just the fifth time in 19 games. For Scherzer in recent weeks, things haven’t always been pretty. They’ve rarely been clean. But he’s doing enough to give the Mets hope that he and Justin Verlander, eventually, can turn this season into something different than what it’s been.

“Promise you, if there was a magic potion, I would have cracked the bottle already and made everybody drink it,” Scherzer said. “There is no magic potion. It’s simply just show up and play better.

“We’re a good team,” Scherzer added. “Nothing’s changed.”

If anyone is living out that message, it’s him. Key to Scherzer’s turnaround has been a renewed snap on his breaking balls -- both his curveball and slider -- which allowed him to strike out eight batters Saturday for the second consecutive start. Although Scherzer ran into trouble at times at Citizens Bank Park, most notably allowing a Nick Castellanos leadoff homer in the fourth and giving up three hits the following inning, he tended to induce swings and misses when he needed them most. That included a whiff of former teammate Bryce Harper with the go-ahead run on third base and two outs in the fifth.

“He competes,” said manager Buck Showalter, who let Scherzer argue his way into starting the sixth inning at 94 pitches. “The aura or the feel of the game when he’s out there competing, people feed off it.”

It helped that Scherzer operated with a lead for much of the afternoon, thanks to Starling Marte’s homer in the first inning. The Mets scored again on Brandon Nimmo’s RBI single in the third and twice more during a six-batter rally in the sixth, then relied on their three highest-leverage relievers -- Brooks Raley, Adam Ottavino and David Robertson -- to finish the game. Upon recording the final five outs on 13 pitches, Robertson quipped that it was “like the greatest day of my life.”

It also helped that the Mets committed none of the defensive or baserunning mistakes that have plagued them in recent weeks. Although avoiding those may fall under what Showalter calls “the Captain Obvious” line of thinking, Scherzer underscored the importance of it multiple times following his start.

“This game makes it so easy to get so negative,” Scherzer said, deriding the idea that the Mets need lucky breaks or outside help to vault up the standings. “We’re not playing that game -- ‘Oh, look at the Braves winning.’ No. Go win. Just win. Focus on what you can control, keep the laser focus and just win. That’s it.

“Look at all the teams in history that have started slow and then won,” he continued, pointing out one example close to his heart: His hometown St. Louis Blues held the worst record in the NHL in December 2018 before rallying to win the Stanley Cup.

Could Scherzer be leading the Mets down a similar path? Following a difficult start to the season in which he battled minor injuries, served a 10-game suspension and carried a 5.56 ERA into mid-May, Scherzer holds a 3.19 mark over his eight-game unbeaten streak. He has improved to 7-2 on the season. His advice to teammates who need to emulate that sort of consistency is simple: “Don’t ride the waves. Don’t go up. Don’t go down. Stay in sync.”

Upon speaking those words, Scherzer paused to consider what he had just said.

“Maybe that’s it,” he concluded. “Maybe that’s the magic potion.”