In the 35 years since Major League Baseball pushed the trade deadline back to the end of July, never has a pitcher so thoroughly dominated his first seven starts with a new team as Max Scherzer has for the Los Angeles Dodgers over the past five weeks. The Dodgers already were the most talented team in baseball before the deal with the Washington Nationals. For them to get Scherzer, not to mention Trea Turner, was showing off. For them to get this version of Scherzer is just felonious.
Because even at 37 years old, even more than 2,500 innings into his no-doubt first-ballot Hall of Fame career, Scherzer looks the part of someone in his prime. His velocity remains potent, his five-pitch mix bewildering, his competitive fire conflagrant. If indeed there is a parallel to what Scherzer is doing, it came a generation ago from a pitcher similarly pedigreed. And if Scherzer can do over his final four starts this season -- the first of which comes Sunday against San Diego -- what he has done in his first seven with Los Angeles, the argument that he's the single greatest pitching pickup in the modern deadline era may have merit.
It's important first to understand the two dynamics in play: Scherzer's performance and his competition. What he's done since his first start with the Dodgers on Aug. 4 is deGromian. Scherzer is 5-0 with a 1.05 ERA -- a quarter-run better than the next-best starter in that time frame this year. Nobody has more strikeouts than his 63 or a better strikeout-to-walk ratio than his 12.6-to-1. His FIP (fielding independent pitching), which uses past performance to predict future success, is tops in all of baseball. He leads the entire sport, hitters included, in wins above replacement. For 43 innings, he has been Zeus flinging bolts of lightning that render everyone else mortal.
Of course, 35 years is quite a long time -- and, to capture a fuller breadth of the history, winding the clock back a couple of years earlier is necessary. In 1984, two days before what then was the June 15 trade deadline, the Chicago Cubs acquired right-hander Rick Sutcliffe from Cleveland in a seven-player deal. Over his 20 starts, he proceeded to go 16-1 with a 2.69 ERA and win the National League Cy Young Award.
Comparing him with Scherzer is like comparing apples and half-eaten apples. The best analogue to Sutcliffe -- and another player for whom a best-midseason-trade-acquisition-ever designation could apply -- is CC Sabathia. On July 7, 2008, Milwaukee shipped a four-player package that included Michael Brantley to Cleveland for Sabathia, and over 17 starts, the left-hander went 11-2, posted a 1.65 ERA in 130⅔ innings and put up nearly 5 WAR. Perhaps the most amazing part of Sabathia's run was that he threw seven complete games over his final 16 regular-season starts with the Brewers. The most complete games by a single team in 2021 is four. Five teams haven't logged a single CG.
And if there's a salient argument against Scherzer's burgeoning case as deadline king, it does revolve around innings pitched -- and how his pale next to his greatest competition in the short-timer category, which applies to those with a dozen or fewer starts with a new team. Since the implementation of the new deadline in 1986, six short-timers have put up numbers that are at least in Scherzer's neighborhood.
As good as Zane Smith was for Pittsburgh in 1990, Rich Harden for the Cubs in 2008, Roy Oswalt with Philadelphia in 2010 and J.A. Happ in Pittsburgh circa 2015, none matches the two pre-Scherzer standard-bearers: Randy Johnson in 1998 and Doyle Alexander in 1987. Alexander is famous for being the answer to the trivia question: Who did the Detroit Tigers receive when they traded future Hall of Famer John Smoltz to Atlanta in a deadline deal? Often left out is Alexander going 9-0 with a 1.53 ERA in 11 starts. Likewise forgotten is that the Tigers summarily got whupped in the ALCS and Alexander gave up 10 runs combined in Game 1 and pennant-clinching Game 5 losses to Minnesota.
That leaves Johnson, the aforementioned pedigreed pitcher. Like Scherzer, he was in his mid-30s and still outlandishly good. After the '98 season, Johnson would sign with the Arizona Diamondbacks and win the NL Cy Young Award every season in what may be the greatest four-year stretch of pitching ever seen, though 1997-2000 Pedro Martinez, 1992-95 Greg Maddux and 1963-66 Sandy Koufax could maintain otherwise. The first sign of what was to come from Johnson arrived Aug. 2, 1998, when he made his first start for an Astros team that had two future Hall of Famers in Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio and was loaded well beyond them. Johnson, who had struggled uncharacteristically in his first 23 starts with Seattle, punched out a dozen in seven innings for Houston. And that was just the beginning.
The next start: a shutout. The one after that: another shutout. Then, after his one loss, Johnson finished the year with a seven-start run that looks quite similar to Scherzer's beginning with the Dodgers. In the end, Johnson's numbers were otherworldly: 10-1 with a 1.28 ERA, 116 strikeouts in 84⅓ innings in an era where guys simply didn't strike out 116 in 84⅓, and deadline supremacy that has gone reasonably unchallenged until ... well, now.
And mind you: Scherzer does still have four starts remaining and, to even think about mustering a claim, must keep shoving. Against San Diego this Sunday, at Cincinnati on Sept. 18, at Arizona on Sept. 24 and in what presumably will be his regular-season finale against the Padres at home Sept. 30. While he has previously had better seven-game stretches ERA-wise, never has Scherzer maintained an ERA as low as 1.05 over 11 games. His best of those stretches: August 2019, when Scherzer finished an 11-start stretch with a 1.23 ERA.
If he can replicate it, there's a path to unseating Johnson. Scherzer's strikeouts per nine are better (13.19 to 12.38), his pitchers under much more control (1.05 walks per nine to 2.77), his induction of fecklessness superior (.465 opponent OPS vs. .519 for Johnson). The rate-stat case is there. What's lacking still is volume.
Suppose Scherzer goes out and throws seven innings in each of his four starts. That would bring his Dodgers total to 71. That's still 13.1 fewer than Johnson in the same number of starts: 11. And while that's certainly not a disqualifier, if the other statistics are close, volume can serve as a separator.
The motivations for Scherzer go far beyond some imaginary title being talked about prematurely. The first step: notch six more strikeouts to become the 19th pitcher in history to join the 3,000 K club. It's a group teeming with Hall of Famers. There's also the matter of the Cy Young, an award Scherzer has won three times, the last in 2017. Never has he finished a season with an ERA as low as the 2.28 he carries today. It should be a dynamite race among Scherzer, his teammate Walker Buehler and Milwaukee right-hander Corbin Burnes, with Philadelphia's Zack Wheeler a few strong starts away from re-entering the conversation.
Then there's a factor that drove Johnson, too: free agency. Johnson signed a four-year, $52 million contract with Arizona following the Astros bowing out to San Diego in the NLDS. While Scherzer won't receive a deal anywhere near the length of his seven-year, $210 million contract that's expiring, he's primed to break the single-season salary record -- and approach in one year the entirety of Johnson's deal. Trevor Bauer, coming off an NL Cy Young Award-winning season, opted for a shorter deal last winter and was guaranteed $40 million this year and $45 million next year. Surely Scherzer is worth the same, right?
It may depend on how he finishes -- and how he finishes depends as much on the four days he isn't starting as the one Scherzer does. Currently, the Dodgers are two games behind the San Francisco Giants for first place in the NL West. They've got 22 games to catch up. If Los Angeles ties San Francisco during the regular season -- and remains on rotation -- Buehler will be lined up to start Oct. 4 in a one-game playoff that would determine which team wins the NL West and which is relegated to the one-game wild card. If the Dodgers wind up there without a tiebreaker, they'll have Buehler available on six days' rest and Scherzer on five days'. One game could be all it takes for even a team as talented as the Dodgers to end its season.
The chance at winning another World Series, though, is what brought Scherzer to Los Angeles this summer. He had veto power over all trades, and he wanted to go to the Dodgers because that's where he saw the easiest path to winning a second ring in three years -- the Dodgers' second in a row. Los Angeles gave up two well-regarded prospects in catcher Keibert Ruiz and right-hander Josiah Gray with the dream of that jewelry in mind.
Not even the Dodgers understood what they were getting. This is Max Scherzer cranked to 11: the fastball is louder, the off-speed stuff angrier, the incentives aligned and his arms extended extra-long, just in case he needs to pluck the crown from King Unit and begin a new reign as the deadline deity nonpareil.