Max Scherzer, Yu Darvish, and the Myth of the Playoff Choke Artist
Max Scherzer, Yu Darvish, and the Myth of the Playoff Choke Artist
One of these pitchers failed to perform yesterday when his team needed him most. You will never guess who.
I.
Eight pitchers took the mound yesterday as the wild-card round of the MLB playoffs kicked off in spectacular fashion. Four of those pitchers lasted all the way into the seventh inning. To put that number in perspective, only four starting pitchers survived into the 7th inning in the entire 2021 playoffs.
This shocking turn of events led to one of the best days of baseball in years. Full stop. The Guardians’ Shane Bieber set the vibe early, as he sliced through a decent Rays’ lineup with ease, allowing three hits and one walk in 7.2 innings pitched on just 99 pitches. His counterpart, the Rays Shane McClanahan, also fired seven innings. But he had the audacity to give up two runs, and with it, took one of the most unfair playoff L’s any of us will ever see.
It was the best-pitched playoff game I’ve seen since Game 1 of the 2017 World Series, when Clayton Kershaw and Dallas Keuchel demonstrated what baseball will look like with a pitch clock. Both games were clean, they were tight, and they were quick—like a Joan Didion essay tidied up by a New Yorker editor.
When baseball is played this way, no other sport can touch it. For a moment it made me a fan of contracting the sport down to just eight teams, so that we might only see the very best players every day. (Then I remembered how sad the other 22 fanbases would be to lose baseball and I decided against tweeting the idea.)
The Guardians’ 2-1 victory took two hours and 17 minutes to complete, which is exactly how long most baseball games should last. My only regret is that this series won’t go seven.
II.
I can’t even write about the Cardinals’ traumatic playoff loss without flashing back to when the Cardinals did this to the Dodgers in Game 1 of the 2014 NLDS. I was reporting my book, and sitting in the Cardinals’ wives section. The ladies I was sitting with knew I wanted the Dodgers to win, for, uh, book sale purposes, and they were gracious not to rub the Dodgers’ collapse right into my face. They seemed to feel genuinely bad, because they knew this sport is terrible. I thought of them yesterday, as the 2022 Cardinals squad completely melted down in the ninth to surrender 6 (!) runs to the Phillies, on the way to losing 6-3.
Of all the losses yesterday, this one hurt the worst, which makes it extremely difficult to see the Cardinals bouncing back to win today and tomorrow to take the series.
Which probably means they will.
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III.
The Mariners traded three of their top five prospects to the Reds for Luis Castillo, so that he might fire seven and one-third innings of shutout playoff baseball for them. That’s exactly what he did, as he gave Seattle its first playoff win in 21 years.
I don’t care what those prospects wind up doing for the Reds: that trade was worth it. How much Is winning a playoff game worth to a team that hasn’t done so since 2001? Twenty million dollars? One hundred million dollars? (Mentally and emotionally, for sure). The Seahawks are in rebuilding mode, which makes the Mariners success right now even more critical for capturing young local fans. Targeting (and paying a lot for) a big-game ace worked perfectly for the M’s, who are now just one win away from advancing to the second round to play the Astros. If only every trade for an ace could work out this way.
IV.
The primetime game featured two aces the Dodgers traded for in recent years to lead them to a World Series title.
Neither one could.
Yu Darvish was famously felled by a cheating Astros team in 2017. Max Scherzer won the wild-card game for Los Angeles last October and closed out the Division Series win over the Giants, but suffered a dead arm that kept him from taking the ball in Game 6 of the NLCS, which gave L.A. virtually no shot against the Braves.
Scherzer entered Friday’s game with a well-earned reputation as a big-game pitcher, given his personality of always wanting the ball. The year he helped lead the Nationals to their only World Series championship, he fired seven shutout innings with a broken nose and a black eye. Nobody serious has ever questioned this man’s physical or mental toughness.
But when he was called on to beat the Braves last weekend and essentially clinch the NL East title for the Mets, he could not do it. And when New York handed him the ball last night to pitch them past the Padres in Game 1 of the wild-card round, he could not do that, either.
Pundits could not believe that Scherzer’s first playoff game for the Mets ended with him getting booed off the mound at Citi Field, having surrendered seven earned runs (including four homers) in just four and two-thirds innings. But I could believe it, because I’ve seen Clayton Kershaw—another first-ballot Hall Of Famer—turn in similar October performances.
After the game, Scherzer was given the chance to blame the fact that he stunk on his recent oblique injury, but he insisted he was fine physically. It was just that his fastball had no rise to it, he said, and it kept leaking over the middle of the plate.
Yu Davish—who posted a 21.60 ERA in two 2017 World Series starts for the Dodgers—went into this matchup versus Scherzer with perhaps the opposite big-game reputation. The later revelation that the Astros illegally stole signs throughout the World Series that year and essentially knew every pitch he was about to throw before he threw it salvaged his rep a little bit, as did his decent playoff performance for the Cubs in 2020 (6.2 IP, 2 ER). But going into last night’s game, Darvish had thrown only 33 playoff innings, compared to 129 for Scherzer. i’m guessing that, despite Scherzer’s clunker vs. the Braves last weekend, most of America would have picked him to outperform Darvish when it mattered most.
He couldn’t do it. It’s possible he is still injured, and that his aching side affected the ball as it came out of his hand. But what’s not possible—given everything we know about Scherzer—is that he was scared. Mets fans are upset that the man their team paid $43 million this year could not do his job last night on the game’s biggest stage. I’d be hopping mad, too, if I were among them. But if you’re good enough to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer like Scherzer or Kershaw or Justin Verlander, you are probably already mentally tougher than 99.9% of the general population.
I’ve seen all three of these men pitch brilliantly in October. And I’ve seen them all fall apart and cost their teams championships. (Verlander gave up 7 earned runs in 11 innings pitched in the World Series last year). Scherzer and Verlander were also teammates on a Tigers squad that lost to the Giants in the 2012 World Series. (Verlander was awful that series, and Scherzer was adequate but Detroit still lost the game he pitched).
I hope last night’s game helps retire the narrative that when aces lose in October it’s because they choke. Sometimes even the greatest to ever do it get beat because they just don’t have it that night. Not having it in October is especially dangerous, because you’re usually called on to extinguish lineups that feature batsmen like Manny Machado and Juan Soto, as Scherzer was last night. Scherzer got beat last night not because he wilted under pressure.
The Mets lost because his fastball stunk, and players like Machado, Josh Bell, Trent Grisham and Jurickson Profar get paid millions of dollars to whack crappy fastballs into the bleachers—which they did.
If a playoff meltdown can happen to Max Scherzer, it can happen to any starting pitcher. Maybe we don’t want to acknowledge that the best among us can simply get beat with no satisfying explanation like an injured oblique or the opposing team cheating because living in an unpredictable world is so scary.
If watching the Dodgers in October for the last decade has taught me anything, it’s that trying to predict playoff baseball is futile. One bad inning can cause a city’s sports fans generational trauma (as it did in St. Louis and in New York yesterday).
Unless, of course, both of those teams can win today. Then the pain of yesterday will be forgotten.
“...the best among us can get beat with no satisfying explanation..”
Yes! This is so often forgotten. Players are human beings and they have off days, like we all do.
Excellent piece, Molly. Thank you.
I started writing a comment on how rare it is for a pitcher to have no clunkers if given enough opportunities. I started writing how the two pitchers I could think of who lacked them are Curt Schilling and Madison Bumgarner.
Except it isn't true.
Schilling DID have a few clunkers in his career. Schilling was pummeled in his first World Series appearance for Philadelphia (remember he played for Philly?). He then came back in that same World Series and pitched a gutsy game in Game 5 to keep the Phils alive. He also had a poor Game 1 in the 2004 ALCS (he again made up for it with the Bloody Sock Game). There was one MORE clunker: and that was against Cleveland in 2007. when the Indians laid into him for 5 runs (he, yes, came back and pitched well in Game 6 to keep the Red Sox alive).
Overall his stat line is superb, better than his excellent regular season stat line, but he still had a few bad games.
Same with Madison. The 2012 NLDS against the Reds was abysmal for Bumgarner, but his team won anyway. He also was bad in the NLCS that same year. BUT: in the World Series against the Rangers he came through big time. The difference between regular season Bumgarner & postseason Bumgarner might be the most stark of any player with a 100 innings.