PORT ST. LUCIE — Max Scherzer stalks the mound like a madman, emotion often dripping like sweat, willing himself to victories any way he can.
He will shout at opposing hitters and umpires — he was ejected last season while in the Mets’ dugout during a game in which he wasn’t pitching — and hunt for edges at any corner.
It is no accident Scherzer was the first pitcher this spring to explore using the pitch clock against opposing hitters.
On the rubber, Scherzer slings more than throws his pitches, which have evolved over the years, but have never broken radar guns.
He whips fastballs and sliders and cutters and curveballs out from a low arm slot that can be difficult to pick up.
There is nothing quite so frantic or deceptive about Justin Verlander. There is a smoothness to his delivery and a calmness to his demeanor. Nothing seems full effort, and little is: There is always an extra gear in his arm as he knows he has that 100-mph fastball holstered for when he needs it.
On the mound, Verlander’s release is not quite as over-the-top as it once was, but he still throws from a high angle and comes down with force.
He might not fool you, but he probably will blow you away.
Scherzer and Verlander are future first-ballot Hall of Famers with little in common except for a shared brilliance, a shared background and a relentless desire to break hitters’ spirits.
The Mets’ co-aces are different pitchers and different humans, who acknowledge their relationship has not always been strong.
“I probably had some guys who were just as competitive, but not any more [competitive],” said their former Detroit manager, Jim Leyland. “You can’t be any more competitive than either one.”
Several former Tigers teammates, coaches and personnel around the club when the two pitched together from 2010-14 thought it was accurate to describe Scherzer, in those days, as the brain and Verlander as the arm.
One wanted to outthink you, the other wanted to overpower you. They both felt they needed to beat you, and they usually did.
“Max tried to find any advantage that he could,” said Rick Knapp, who was the Tigers’ pitching coach from 2009-11. He was looking for things that would make him better, whether they were intellectual or whether they were physical. He worked tirelessly at trying to perfect what became his delivery and what became his repertoire.
“Verlander, that wasn’t his approach. His approach was: ‘I’m going to be good. I have the stuff to be good, and my stuff is going to carry me.’ ”
Neither Scherzer nor Verlander agreed with the broad characterizations some offered.
Scherzer quickly defended Verlander, saying he “has got a good pitching IQ.” But they know they had their differences while they were teammates in Detroit, and both have said those differences are in the past.
They have moved on, and they cannot wait to win together. They believe they can finally unite with the Mets and win plenty while forging a stronger relationship this time around.
A combined $86 million in 2023 is riding on the ringers in the Mets’ rotation working together to accomplish something they have only done apart: hoisting a World Series trophy. Verlander has won twice with Houston and Scherzer has won once with Washington, but they have shared zero championships.
To understand why two of the best pitchers the game has ever seen have not always seen eye to eye, it is helpful to understand their reputations — even if public personas do not always perfectly equate to private personalities.
Verlander’s reputation with the Tigers was solidified as soon as he parked his car at his first major league spring training.
He was the second-overall pick in 2004 out of Old Dominion and became one of the first college players to sign a major league deal out of the draft. He arrived at his first Tigers spring training soon thereafter with a live arm that could buzz triple-digits in an era when few could, and a new license plate that underscored his arsenal and his confidence: “BRNGN IT.”
When veteran Tigers players learned the plate belonged to the new kid, they brought it, too.
“The next few days, it was on,” one person around the club said.
Hazing was far more prevalent then in MLB than it is now, and there were veterans around the club who did not care for Verlander’s perceived bravado. But the customized plate, according to Verlander, was a product of a father’s love: His dad had gifted him the license as a birthday present and was proud of it.
Verlander did not want to turn it down and knew “I was going to get some s–t for it.”
“I wore it for a lot of teammates,” said Verlander, who reached the majors in 2005 and became Rookie of the Year in 2006. “But then I was throwing 101, so I was bringing it.”
There are some young pitchers who struggle and need confidence boosts. Verlander was not one of them.
Even as a rookie, any hint of disbelief would be sent back to the dugout.
“This guy’s walking in here like, ‘OK, I’m coming in here and I’m going to win games, and that’s the way it’s going to be,’ ” said Mike Maroth, who was a rotation mate of Verlander’s from 2005-07. “You scratch your head a little bit. It’s like, man, he sounds a little confident here. It got your attention.”
He knew he could throw 100 mph. He knew he had a changeup and curveball that were hard to touch, and a slider that soon filled out his arsenal.
And he knew opposing hitters could not do much about it.
“He would always say that every pitch was his No. 1 pitch,” said Scott Pickens, who was Detroit’s bullpen catcher from 2006-13. “You don’t talk to him like, ‘This is your No. 2 pitch.’ … Every pitch to him is his No. 1.”
Verlander always had the arm that could back up his belief. In his first start of 2006, he threw seven shutout, two-hit innings against the Rangers.
Verlander’s fourth start of the season was an anticipated matchup against Seattle’s Felix Hernandez.
“I don’t think he threw a pitch under 99 that entire game,” said Maroth, who watched as Verlander allowed one run in seven innings in a win. “I think he was like 99 to 101 that entire game.”
It only took until Verlander’s ninth start of the season for his first complete-game shutout. Leyland pushed him for 114 pitches, and Verlander allowed just five hits to the Royals.
As became his calling card, he only got stronger as the game wore on.
“He was throwing 96, mid-90s for most of the game,” remembered Maroth, now a pitching coach at Central Florida. “Then all of a sudden in the ninth inning, he has a chance to close out the game and have a complete game, and he’s just pumping 99 in. It was like, whoa.”
He brought it.
“He was a confident guy,” Maroth said. “He was good, and he knew he was good, and he came in and proved it right from the start.”
If Verlander blazed his way to the top, Scherzer worked his way.
The guy they call “Mad Max,” though, was not an odds-defying underdog.
Scherzer was the 11th-overall pick of the Diamondbacks out of Missouri in 2006, and he debuted with Arizona in 2008.
After an up-and-down 2009 season, Scherzer was shipped to Detroit in a three-way trade that sent Curtis Granderson to the Yankees.
In Scherzer’s first season with the Tigers, he was sent down to the minors after eight starts, in which he had posted a 7.29 ERA. Scherzer was recalled barely two weeks later, at the end of May, and never looked back.
“When he came back, it was almost like a light bulb went off as far as what he needed to do to be consistent from a mechanical standpoint,” said Alex Avila, who caught Scherzer and Verlander more than anyone. “From then on, it was just a steady improvement.”
Scherzer was brilliant the rest of the season, won his first Cy Young in 2013 and joined Verlander on a starry top of the rotation that featured a couple of alpha personalities.
Scherzer has never lacked for confidence and, even in his early years, was on the cutting edge of the analytical movement. He “forced me to take an understanding of what was happening on some of those [analytics] websites,” Knapp said.
Scherzer wanted to know everything about his pitches’ movements and trajectories.
He created routines, including legendary bullpen sessions in which everyone around the pen was involved: After a fastball, everybody would have to give their finger gun a blow. He was writing his own legend as a competitor.
So was Verlander, who won MVP and Cy Young in 2011.
“I want to say they fed off of each other,” said Knapp, now the assistant pitching coach of the Rays. “But they fed on each other.”
Scherzer “chased” Verlander, Knapp said, because Verlander had established himself as a star first. Rotations often are competitive, but a rotation with two of the most competitive athletes alive could test boundaries.
Young Rick Porcello broke into the majors in 2009 and quickly pitched well, winning the Rookie of the Month award for May. According to his then-pitching coach, Verlander used Porcello’s success as personal fuel.
“That burned Verlander,” Knapp said. “That set a fire to him to get better, to be good, to figure some things out. He just tirelessly tried to figure some things out.”
Verlander disputed that Tigers pitchers saw teammates as opponents.
“That’s not how I viewed it,” Verlander said. “I think a healthy competitiveness is great. I would think that [feeding on each other], if that’s the way somebody viewed it, that’s fringing upon unhealthy.”
A large part of the secret to Verlander’s and Scherzer’s historic careers, Knapp said, is that “neither wants to be second in anything.” But the Tigers kept finishing second.
Detroit won the AL Central each season from 2011-14, and got as far as the World Series in 2012. They swept the Yankees in the ALCS that year, only to be swept by the Giants in the World Series.
In 2014, Buck Showalter’s Orioles swept Detroit in the ALDS, which broke up perhaps the greatest co-aces to never win it all: Scherzer signed with the Nationals; Verlander was flipped to the Astros in 2017.
“A lot of us from those Detroit days talk all the time about how much talent was on those teams, and we just couldn’t be that last team standing,” said Avila, a Tiger from 2009-15 who later caught Scherzer in 2021 with the Nationals. “Obviously, they both have been able to win a World Series after the fact. … [The Mets signing both] was kind of exciting for me, too, because I was like, man, this will be fun to be able to watch this year play out with those two in the same rotation again.”
This time, Verlander and Scherzer say, will be better together.
Verlander looked back on his Tigers days, which began the same year YouTube was founded.
“Jesus, I was a kid,” Verlander said.
Ahead of his age-40 season, he still can throw 100, but he is no longer solely relying on a golden arm.
A more mature Verlander is married and has married his stuff with his intellect. He is throwing fewer fastballs than ever, and on the other end of 2020 Tommy John surgery, his pitching is defying logic: He might be coming off his best season ever, which was his 17th.
This will be his sixth season as teammates with Scherzer, but it is expected to be unlike the previous five.
“We didn’t end up being the best of friends, and that’s OK,” Verlander said. “I think now, I’m hopeful that we can find out we have a lot of things in common. I think we’re already starting that journey.”
Their competitive fires have not dimmed, but both Scherzer and Verlander have said they are being aimed in the right direction. Scherzer essentially has been an honorary pitching coach since joining the Mets, and Verlander took David Peterson under his wing this spring.
“I want him to win. I don’t have to be better,” Scherzer said of Verlander. “I gotta be the best version of myself.
“The guys who I face are the hitters.”
