Max Scherzer was an early adopter for analysis. When I first interviewed him Baseball prospectus Back in August 2010, the right-hander called himself “a very math person” and added: “The advanced metrics that appear throughout the game… helped me understand and simplify the game.”
Fifteen years later, Shece was an older politician and a third-time CY Young Award winner, and his craft was different from before. It’s not that he no longer values analysis – he does – but that half of the decade and a half of the decade and a half of the big leagues have changed his point of view. (He talked about the evolution in an interview with the Fangraphs two summers ago.) Now, with the Toronto Blue Jays and the back of the profession that should have landed him in Cooperstown, the 40-year-old Scherzer places great emphasis on unquantifiable pitching aspects.
The topic at hand was he volunteered to participate. I know Scherzer has both extensive marketing knowledge and good opinions, so I asked an open-ended question: What should we talk about?
This is the conversation that follows to edit with better clarity.
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David Laurila: You mentioned belief…
Max Scherzer: “Yes. Now, guys are filled with information and what they really need to do is compete there and learn that when you’re beaten, it’s not the shape of the court. Actually, it’s actually a sequence or a belief, or 1000 other things, or something else. Talking to a lot of young people, that’s what they care about, they’re selling more.
Laurila: Is there any relationship between shape and belief? Are tones that are not fully faithful often less sharp?
Scherzer: “They can, but I don’t feel like that’s coming out in the data. I do know that when you’re not 100% convicted of pitching, you usually don’t take it back. The batsman probably hit a home run.”
Laurila: why is that?
Scherzer: “That’s the line at this level. If you don’t throw the court with 100% faith and take it to the area you’re trying to get… I mean, I mean, batsmen are so great right now. They will casually put the error in their seats. That’s why it’s important to believe in the back of the court so important. You can’t be in between.
“Suppose you are between the slider and the change, and you end up with the slider. At the same time, part of your brain might be saying, ‘Maybe I should change a change?’ That’s your line of thought, what happened is that you are not flinching.”
Laurila: Will tone thrown without faith be misallocated?
Scherzer: “Yes, because you’re not attacking with everything you have. The metrics look relatively normal – speed and shape – but the position may not, which means trouble.”
Laurila: You’ve thrown a lot of balls over the years. I have to believe that some people don’t have 100% beliefs, but your exposure is weak…
Scherzer: “No. Those are very little distance from each other. It seems that there has never been a thing in between and positive results.”
Laurila: How to play the ball dynamic in the equation? For example, a young pitcher might think of something different, but he hesitated to get rid of the veteran catcher.
Scherzer: “One thing I always tell young people is that everyone in this club wants you to throw the court you want to throw. Even the rookie. ‘Hey, do you want to throw this court?
Laurila: Even a veteran catcher?
Scherzer: “Even an experienced catcher. You might have something happening to a particular tone; there’s a reason. You don’t want to throw something. You can talk about it, but then there’s a part of other equations: the clock. Regarding the negatives of the clock, it’s getting rid of too much time from there. You don’t have much time. Playing the game is basic.
“I wear a hairpin so I can call it, but usually you want the receiver to call the court because he has a different perspective. The catcher is your eyes and ears, so you want them to drive the game. I don’t like the 100% of what I call me, I still want the majority of the catcher. I still call most of the call – there’s a change in that and the clock changes.”
Laurila: Suppose you throw 100 balls at the beginning. How many times does the catcher need, and then you intuitively agree that this is the same time you thought of?
Scherzer: “Well, it depends. How much did I work with that catcher? How many times did we go through all the situations? How did he like to call the game? How do I want to call the game and use my stuff? That’s a complicated answer.
“Suppose I’m totally synced with the catcher. It’s not a lot…I mean, sometimes you’re in between. It’s a slider and a substitution, and he calls the slide. OK, you might choose it. But if he calls the heater, but that’s when the pitcher, that’s when the pitcher is. The next court.
Laurila: How does sequencing work? There is a game plan, and then the pitch is a bit of a pitch.
Scherzer: “To me, it’s usually a sequence of two strings. It’s not like everything planned, every script has been made. Things keep changing. You’re trying to expect all the cat and mouse games ongoing and you’re weighing “Hey, we have a plan, or go off the plan.” ”
Laurila: Maybe the plan for a certain batsman has a good slider, then an overhead fastball, but your intuition says….
Scherzer: “Yes. It’s possible, ‘I just saw something, so no, we’re going to go back to the slider. Yes, OK. I know we’re talking about the slot-to-to-heater, but based on what I’ve seen on this slider, we’re going to go back to it.'”
Laurila: When you throw it away, you need to be fully faithful….
Scherzer: “You can’t measure it. You can’t measure belief, but you know how important it is. Talk to any pitcher and they know. They know what it feels like when they throw a very convicted pitch. They also know what it feels like when they’re not 100% convicted.”
Laurila: As a veteran pitcher, can you tell someone when they don’t have the faith to pitch?
Scherzer: “Yes. That’s the human eye. You’ll find that this happens to some people……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
“After a game, you can talk. It might be, ‘Oh, I saw it for the first time, so I wanted to try to do something else, but then I introduced what I wanted to do.’ You don’t want any challenging ideas.
“Mentally, it’s hard to be completely convicted on every tone. I know. There are a lot of decisions to make in the game, which are a lot of small factors and can affect the sequence. But to be completely committed to each pitch…how important it is because it’s unquantifiable.”
Laurila: In a game where everything seems to be quantified
Scherzer: “The art and science of pitching…we have a lot of numbers, so much mathematics, so much science. People now think about games in a completely different way, and sometimes we lack art. We lack focus on art. We are thinking about things like robots, not like humans, not like humans, and trying to make decisions based on another person, which is the challenge of pitching.” It is the challenge of pitching. ”
