When it mattered most, a decorated future Hall of Fame pitcher, Max Scherzer, did not do his job in the Wildcard Series opener Friday night. Max Scherzer is the highest paid player in Major League Baseball in terms of average annual salary, clearing Mike Trout and Gerrit Cole by over seven million dollars per year.
Scherzer gave up seven runs, in Glavine-esque fashion, all via the home run, on Friday night, leaving Mets fans dejected, just as he did the previous weekend when the Atlanta Braves dangerous lineup implied the 38 year-old may have been overpaid.
The Padres proved it.
It may seem harsh to deem this as proof, but this is not the first time Scherzer’s aging arm has failed him down the stretch of a long season and into the postseason.
Last season, after he was acquired by the Dodgers alongside standout infielder Trea Turner, he suffered a ‘dead-arm’ in the playoffs, resulting in low pitch counts.
This is the man who, just months later, secured the largest salary of all time. He was 37 years old the day he signed that contract.
Why?
It seemed to make sense all season, but when the lights shined brightest, the rationale went out the window.
The sport is about winning. All sports are about winning. Scherzer lost. Twice.
The ‘win now’ mentality among front offices is admirable in its own right, with owners such as Steve Cohen shelling out ridiculous money to inflate their egos and, hopefully, their sometimes beloved team’s chance at winning on the biggest stage.
After this season, Taijuan Walker, Chris Bassitt, Carlos Carrasco, and Jacob deGrom are all free agents. Max, however, is under team control through the 2024 season, a season he will conclude as a 40 year old, getting paid $3,000,000 greater than his age times one million.
To me, this sounds like a rotation of not four, but five question marks.
Make it make sense.
Scherzer posted a 2.29 ERA during his injury plagued debut campaign as a Met; a respectable number with a smaller sample size than many had foolishly hoped for.
Many Met fans were thankful all season long to have such a distinguished arm in the rotation to compliment, even temporarily replacing, Jacob deGrom.
Scherzer fared quite well.
Scherzer is also egregiously overpaid.
He is overpaid because Cohen and the Mets paid him for the important moments. They did not pay him for success during the middle portion of the regular season.
While the new ownership is certainly far less stingy than the Wilpon family of degenerate scum that preceded it, this “progress” season is still a failure. There is no progress. There is win and there is lose, that’s it.
This season is, at risk of predisposing, was defined by the failures of the highest paid player in MLB history during some of the most important games in New York Mets history.
Mets fans are not a patient breed.
It is the perfect storm: an impatient group of fans, including my angry self, many of whom have never seen the Mets win a World Series, came into this season, and lived about five months of it in a magical daze, maintaining a 100 win pace pretty much all year, only to lose the division to the Braves, in part, due to Scherzer’s late season failure.
Outshone by the Yankees in the first half, and ultimately finishing two games to their superior in the regular season, felt like a moral victory of sorts.
I can say with certainty, fans do not care. Real fans do not care. I do not give a damn.
Real fans care where the money goes as if it is their own.
It took awhile for the hype to cool off around Scherzer’s signing, a process that was slowed by his excellence early in the year.
That, though, is just it, the success came early in the year. The success also came in the middle of the year….and towards the end of the year, that is, during the portion of it spent on the field.
However, his starts versus the Braves and Padres, his last two and easily his most important, were glaring failures of the season-defining variety.
Scherzer showed colors far from his historic true colors, but rather some new colors—some bright, neon, colors one might spend too much money to repaint a car with.
They were not pretty ones.