Max Scherzer dominates the Astros as the Mets win

HOUSTON — When a pitcher in his late 30s begins to struggle, it can be difficult to deduce the causes. Is it the kind of slump that all players go through at points in their careers? Is it the result of continuous deterioration? A flash that will pass or the beginning of the end?

Faced with these whispered questions Monday night at Minute Maid Park, six days after one of the worst starts of his career, Max Scherzer gave a very emphatic answer. Prior to Monday, Scherzer had not entered the eighth inning of a game since joining the Mets. In an 11-1 defeat of the Astros that also included offensive tackles by Francisco Lindor and Daniel Vogelbach, Scherzer completed eight powerful goals to calmly talk about his issues.

“Our job is to go out there and dive in,” Sherzer said. “Honestly, I haven’t done that in the past two starts.”

So Scherzer set out to turn that tide against a team that, despite its relative decline, remains one of the noteworthy offenses in the league. The most influential part of Scherzer’s renaissance was his slider, which he often describes as his bread and butter class. It was the slider who betrayed Scherzer during his final start, hanging over the core of the strike zone during the crucial moments. Against the Yankees, Scherzer threw 17 sliders and produced only one whiff.

Six days later, he has thrown 31 of them with seven swings and misses.

“He executed his slider much better,” said catcher Francisco Alvarez through an interpreter. “Much better.”

For Scherzer, the fix was relatively simple. Earlier this month, he tweaked his arm motion on his changeup, hoping to make that pitch more consistent. When the modification worked, Scherzer tried applying the same fix to his slider. That had the opposite effect, causing him to revert to his old mechanics on both courts.

Just like that, the old slider is back and it’s easy to see: on consecutive swings against José Altuve to score his first out of the night; on successive hits by Jose Abreu and Yaner Diaz in the second half; And so on and so forth. Although Scherzer allowed his only run on the slider when Diaz homered in the seventh, he wasn’t upset with the quality of that pitch. He remained confident in it. Then, Scherzer followed a sharp inside slide to Jeremy Peña with a 95 mph fastball into the outside corner to freeze him.

“He doesn’t throw as hard as I’ve seen him, but he always had a good slider,” said Astros manager Dusty Baker, who managed Scherzer for two years in Washington. “It was the slider that set up everything else tonight.”

Mostly, Scherzer was happy to get a win for a team that’s lost seven straight games against the Astros, not to mention 11 of 14 overall. Other Mets have played notable roles—Lindor, for example, who hit a three-run homer in the third inning and a two-run double in the ninth, and Vogelbach, whose contributions included a solo homer and one. But it was the starting pitcher who kept himself in the thick of things all evening.

When Scherzer returned to the dugout after the eighth inning, having pushed a double ball to complete his night in just 91 pitches, he began joking with several of his teammates. The heaviness left behind after his last start seems to have disappeared.

Scherzer is not, as manager Buck Showalter said afterwards, “some ogre you can’t be around or talk to” after bad starts. But he is a ruthless self-critic, constantly looking for solutions. These personality traits were applied when he broke into the league at age 23. They remained true when he picked up his first Cy Young Award at age 28, and when he won a World Series at age 34.

Now, a month after his 39th birthday, Scherzer is committed to getting better than ever. Obviously, he still can, too.

“We had a real need to dig deeper into that game,” Showalter said. “For him to go through eight rounds, it was very special in many ways.”