Justin Verlander And Max Scherzer Faced Off For The First Time Last Night And It Was An Absolute Dud

It was a once-in-a-generation matchup, and yet I hope we never see it again. I wrote a blog yesterday about how excited I was to watch Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer go up against each other. Little did I know I would have turned the game off by the third inning. Verlander held his own. He was sensational for Houston, pitching seven innings and giving up one earned run. But the game itself was never in doubt. Houston jumped on Max Scherzer early and often and ran away with this ball game.

I wrote in my blog yesterday about how I’ve noticed that both of these guys seem to have taken a small step back this season. After last night, I would argue that Max Scherzer has probably taken a big step back. Max Scherzer, at 39 years old, having taken a step back, is still better than 90% of pitchers in Major League Baseball. 

We talk about injuries all the time, but sometimes all it takes is one start to lose the Hall Of Fame stuff you once had. That was the case in the Wild Card round for Max Scherzer last year. Scherzer was great for the Mets a year ago. Yeah, he had to deal with some injuries, but when he pitched, he was fantastic. They signed him to pitch in big games, and he had arguably the worst start of his career in Game One against the Padres. He’s had his moments this year. He’d actually been excellent for the Rangers since getting traded, but they needed him last night, and he didn’t deliver. 

Scherzer was awful, but his laying an egg falls in line with how the rest of the team has performed over the last month. The Rangers were already in freefall. To be outscored 39-10 in a three-game series against their biggest rival is brutal. If the Rangers miss the playoffs, it will go down as one of the great collapses in baseball history. I thought they were the team to beat in the American League for so much of the season. The possibility of them not even making the postseason seemed like a foreign concept until recently.

I don’t know, man. I just thought maybe we’d get a little bit of baseball magic last night. I thought we’d get Scherzer and Verlander turning the clock back several years and pitching lights out in a big game. That wasn’t the case. Verlander was solid. Scherzer got demolished. I feel like their performances last night indicate how those teams are playing right now. Houston went for the kill shot, and Texas bent over and took it. We may never see these two face off ever again. If things go as they did last night, I hope we don’t.