Scherzer Looks Sharp (And His Pitches Look Sharper) in Spring Training Debut

Age and health are the big concerns for Max Scherzer this year. Will the 40-year-old Scherzer be able to bounce back from an injury-plagued 2024 season in which his velocity ticked down and his stuff ticked down even further, or is that just who he is now? The Blue Jays got an encouraging sign on Tuesday, as Scherzers' first spring training went off without a hitch. Well, with two minor hitches. The first hitch came early, when Scherzer allowed Cardinals leadoff batter Victor Scott III to lace a triple into left center. More concerning than the hard contact was center fielder Joey Loperfido getting turned around and crashing awkwardly into the wall. The second hitch came in Scherzer’s second and final inning, when he challenged an umpire’s call only for the automated ball-strike system to demonstrate that his curveball missed the plate by a massive margin. But that was it for the hitches! Scherzer looked fantastic, reaching 94.2 mph with his fastball, striking out four, and needing just 34 pitches to get through his two innings.

Scherzer’s fastball averaged 92.6 mph, a tenth of a mile an hour faster than he averaged in 2024. That’s an encouraging sign this early in spring training, as bouncing back toward the 93.7 mph he averaged in 2023 would be a huge help in making sure that his stuff plays well. Scherzer even got one of his trademark strikeouts on a fastball up at the top of the zone, a huge part of his game.

The thing that jumped out at me was Scherzer’s changeup. He threw just four changeups, but they looked particularly sharp to the naked eye, and Statcast confirmed that the pitch averaged 16 inches of arm-side run while coming in at 82.8 mph, almost exactly what it averaged in 2024. Scherzer’s changeup never approached that much horizontal break in any of his 2024 starts, and only reached it a couple times in 2023. Here’s a graph to help you visualize the difference. It shows the average break on Scherzer’s changeup for every game over the past three seasons. The big orange dot is Tuesday’s game.

As you can see, the dots have drifted down and toward the left over time. The yellow dots for 2022 had more rise and more arm-side run, and the blue dots for 2024 had the least. However, on Saturday, Scherzer’s change looked much closer to its 2023 form, with some of the most extreme run he's seen in quite a bit. According to pitching analyst Thomas Nestico, Scherzer’s changeup earned a stuff grade of 95 in 2024, but on Tuesday, it was worth an excellent 114.

The changeup has historically been the weak spot in Scherzer’s repertoire. Pitch modeling system Stuff+ has considered it Scherzer’s weakest offering in each of the past five seasons, and according to Baseball Savant’s run values, it has cost accrued a negative run value in nearly every season dating all the way back to 2019. Just to be very transparent, I am overreacting to four pitches. It’s still just February, and we’ll have to wait and see whether Scherzer’s changeup is able to hold onto that extra bite. It’s absolutely possible that it will disappear. However, his other stuff looked sharper too, and let’s not forget that Scherzer was very impaired by injury in 2024. If what we saw on Tuesday is indicative of who Scherzer is once he’s fully healthy, Jays fans could be in for a treat.