How Max Scherzer uses season’s riskiest time for pitchers to thrive in-season

DUNEDIN, Fla. – Max Scherzer believes spring training is one of the most dangerous times of the season for pitchers. The ramp-up from winter throwing to getting off a mound with intent and aggression is a big transition, he explained, one that can lead to injury.

After all, “every time you're out there, you're kind of pushing a new boundary to yourself as you're getting back into the mid-season form,” Scherzer said after a quiet workout day at Toronto Blue Jays camp. “From my perspective, you've really got to build your foundation up, really got to build your endurance up so that your body can handle that ramp up.

“If you don't have a good foundation, then bad things can happen.”

All of which helps explain why the duration and intensity of the 40-year-old’s first two side sessions of the spring generated so much buzz around his new team. Beyond simply marvelling at the mid-February pitch count – his first bullpen Thursday was 50ish pitches – the deliberate nature with which he threw each pitch, many with Myles Straw standing in, and worked counts, mood fluctuating pitch-to-pitch, resonated.

“You can see why he's as good as he is and as good as he has been,” said manager John Schneider. “He's finding ways to keep himself motivated between pitches in February. You can see where he's separated himself from a mentality standpoint.”

Still, for someone nicknamed Mad Max due to his ferocity on the field, it’s all method, no madness, especially after an injury-marred 2024 when he was rehabbing from back surgery and later dealt with shoulder and hamstring injuries.

“I like to push the pitch count right now and make sure I have a good foundation of getting the mound work in, making sure my arm responds well,” said Scherzer. “You're going to get sore, that's normal. But you don't want anything to get hurt. That's what I'm trying to guard against.”

The Blue Jays, of course, are trying to do the same thing with a rotation set to also include veterans Kevin Gausman, 34, Jose Berrios, 30, and Chris Bassitt, 35, along with Bowden Francis, a relative pup at 28.

In the four years since the pandemic-shortened season of 2020, Berrios has logged 746 innings, Gausman 732.2 and Bassitt 710, a workload very much in the club’s thinking. The $15.5-million, one-year deal for Scherzer was designed, in part, to mitigate against the potential of all those frames catching up, allowing Yariel Rodriguez to serve as a backup plan while providing meaningful innings out of the bullpen.

While last season, the Blue Jays used strategic spot starts over the final two months of the year to almost exclusively allow their veteran trio to start on an extra day of rest, right now, “we envision five” starters to start the season, said pitching coach Pete Walker.

At the same time, “there's nothing in stone, we're tossing around some different ideas ... we'll be creative at times, I think, throughout the course of the year,” he added. “We’re going to see how spring training goes and how these guys bounce back. But obviously, the veteran pitchers have logged a lot of innings and we want them around all year.”

To that end, the Blue Jays will employ a build-up plan similar to that of recent springs, seeking to get each of their starters to the 90-95 pitch range by the time camp ends, said Schneider.

“What we're trying to do is really hit the ground running and hopefully get off to a good start,” he continued. “So there may be, if a guy's scheduled to throw two innings and he's got pitches left, he may go back out for a third up. But just being in constant contact with how they're feeling and really making sure we're not under-doing it, if that makes sense.”

That will work out fine with Scherzer, whose focus isn’t just about being strong and ready to start a ballgame, but to be similarly strong at pitch 100 of an outing, too.

Building up the stamina to maintain velocity involves “throwing, running, lifting, you name it,” he said, covering “the totality of everything that you do and how you work.”

The driving factor is “understanding when the most important outs are,” Scherzer said. “Typically, your most important outs are your last 15 pitches. It's also when you're in a game that you're kind of on cruise control that you understand, hey, no matter what goes on here, your last 15 pitches are most likely going to determine your outing. I won't say you're holding back, but you're making sure that you still have something left in the tank so you can tell the manager, hey, I'm good to go, or, I'm not.”

Getting to that point starts now, for Scherzer and others, with a spring aimed at not just surviving one of the year’s most dangerous points for pitchers, but thriving throughout the season to follow.