Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander are future first-ballot Hall of Famers with little in common except for a relentless desire to break hitters’ spirits.
PORT ST. LUCIE — Max Scherzer stalks the mound like a madman, emotion often dripping like sweat, willing himself to victories any way he can.
He whips fastballs and sliders and cutters and curveballs out from a low arm slot that can be difficult to pick up. The Mets’ co-aces are different pitchers and different humans, who acknowledge their relationship has not always been strong. “Max tried to find any advantage that he could,” said Rick Knapp, who was the Tigers’ pitching coach from 2009-11. He was looking for things that would make him better, whether they were intellectual or whether they were physical. He worked tirelessly at trying to perfect what became his delivery and what became his repertoire.
To understand why two of the best pitchers the game has ever seen have not always seen eye to eye, it is helpful to understand their reputations — even if public personas do not always perfectly equate to private personalities. There are some young pitchers who struggle and need confidence boosts. Verlander was not one of them.“This guy’s walking in here like, ‘OK, I’m coming in here and I’m going to win games, and that’s the way it’s going to be,’ ” said Mike Maroth, who was a rotation mate of Verlander’s from 2005-07. “You scratch your head a little bit. It’s like, man, he sounds a little confident here. It got your attention.
Scherzer was the 11th-overall pick of the Diamondbacks out of Missouri in 2006, and he debuted with Arizona in 2008. Scherzer put up rather pedestrian numbers in his first two years, posting a combined 3.86 ERA and a 9-15 record with the Diamondbacks.Scherzer was brilliant the rest of the season, won his first Cy Young in 2013 and joined Verlander on a starry top of the rotation that featured a couple of alpha personalities.
Alex Avila, who caught Scherzer in Detroit, said the eventual three-time Cy Young winner was a different pitcher after he was briefly sent to the minors during his first season with the Tigers.“That burned Verlander,” Knapp said. “That set a fire to him to get better, to be good, to figure some things out. He just tirelessly tried to figure some things out.”“That’s not how I viewed it,” Verlander said. “I think a healthy competitiveness is great.
“A lot of us from those Detroit days talk all the time about how much talent was on those teams, and we just couldn’t be that last team standing,” said Avila, a Tiger from 2009-15 who later caught Scherzer in 2021 with the Nationals. “Obviously, they both have been able to win a World Series after the fact. … [The Mets signing both] was kind of exciting for me, too, because I was like, man, this will be fun to be able to watch this year play out with those two in the same rotation again.
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