A Conversation With Max Scherzer on the Importance of Conviction

Max Scherzer was an early adoptee of analytics. When I first interviewed him for Baseball Prospectus back in August 2010, the right-hander called himself “a very mathematical guy,” adding that “the advanced metrics that are coming out throughout the game… have helped me to understand and simplify the game.”

Fifteen years later, Scherzer is an elder statesmen — and a three-time Cy Young Award winner — who approaches his craft differently than he once did. That’s not to say he no longer values analytics — he does — but a decade and a half of facing big league hitters has altered his perspective. (He addressed that evolution in an interview that ran here at FanGraphs two summer ago.) Now with the Toronto Blue Jays and on the back stretch of a career that should land him in Cooperstown, the 40-year-old Scherzer highly values an aspect of pitching that can’t be quantified.

The subject at hand was one he volunteered. Knowing Scherzer possesses both a wealth of pitching knowledge and well-formed opinions, I approached him with an open-ended question: What should we talk about?

Here is the conversation that followed, edited lightly for better clarity.

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David Laurila: You mentioned conviction…

Max Scherzer: “Yes. Guys now are flooded with information, and what they really need to be doing is going out there and competing, and understanding that when you do get beat, it’s not the shape of the pitch. It’s actually the sequence, or the conviction, or it could be 1,000 other things. Talking to lot of young guys, that’s what they care about, their pitch shapes. There’s so much more to pitching than that. Those are the discussions we need to have with the next generation.”

Laurila: Is there are a relationship between shapes and conviction? Do pitches that aren’t thrown with full conviction tend to be less sharp?

Scherzer: “They can be, but I don’t feel like that shows up in the data. I do know that when you’re not 100% convicted to a pitch you usually don’t get it back. The hitter probably hit a home run.”

Laurila: Why is that?

Scherzer: “That’s how fine of a line it is at this level. If you don’t throw the pitch with 100% conviction and get it to the area you’re trying to get it to… I mean, the hitters are so good right now. They put mistakes in the seats at will. That’s why having conviction behind the pitch is so important. You can’t be in between.

“Let’s say you’re in between a slider and a changeup, and you end up going with the slider. At the same time, part of your brain might be saying, ‘Maybe I should throw the changeup?’ That’s your train of thought, and what happens is that you don’t get that slider back.”

Laurila: Do pitches thrown without conviction tend to be mis-located?

Scherzer: “Yes, because you’re not attacking with everything you’ve got. The metrics might look relatively normal — the velocity and the shape — but the location probably won’t be, which means trouble.”

Laurila: You’ve thrown a lot of pitches for a lot of years. I have to believe that some have been without 100% conviction, yet you got weak contact…

Scherzer: “Nah. Those have been few and far between. It just never seems to happen that you’re in between on a pitch and get a positive result.”

Laurila: How does the catcher-pitcher dynamic play into the equation? For instance, a younger pitcher might have something different in mind, but he’s hesitant to shake off a veteran catcher.

Scherzer: “One thing I always tell the young guys is that everybody in this clubhouse wants you to throw the pitch that you want to throw. Even the rookies. ‘Hey, you want to throw this pitch? Everybody in here wants you to throw the pitch you want to throw.’”

Laurila: Even the veteran catcher?

Scherzer: “Even the veteran catcher. You might have something going on for that specific pitch; there’s a reason why you don’t want to throw something else. You can talk about it, but then there’s the other part of the equation: the clock. One of the negatives about the clock is that it’s taken away from the ability to shake. You don’t have much time out there. Game-play has fundamentally changed to where maybe you got one shake, two shakes, and that’s it.

“I wear the transponder, so I can call it, but usually you want the catcher to be calling the pitches, because he has a different perspective. Catchers are kind of your eyes and ears, so you want them driving the game. I don’t like when I’m calling 100% of my game. I still want the catcher calling majority of it — there’s a rhythm to that — and the clock has changed that.”

Laurila: Let’s say you throw 100 pitches in a start. How many times will the catcher call for a pitch and you intuitively agree, where it’s the same one you had in mind?

Scherzer: “Well, it depends. How much have I worked with that catcher? How many times have we gone through all the situations? How does he like to call a game? How do I like to call a game and use my stuff? It’s a complicated answer.

“Let’s say I’m fully synced up with the catcher. It’s not so much about… I mean, sometimes you’re in between. Let’s say it’s a slider and changeup, and he calls a slider. OK, you might just go with it. But if he calls a heater, that’s when a pitcher is shaking. Like, I’m not throwing a fastball in this situation. But if I’m 50-50 slider/changeup and he calls a slider, OK. I will also already know where I’m going with the next pitch. Pitches kind of play off each other.”

Laurila: How does sequencing tend to work? There is game-planning, and then there is pitch-to-pitch feel.

Scherzer: “For me, it’s generally two-pitch sequences. And it’s not like everything is planned out, that every script has been made. Things change all the time. You go in with a huge plan, but then you’re in the game and it kind of gets, ‘All right, what just happened? What did you see? How did we actually execute? What did he do? Was he ultra-aggressive? Was he passive?’ You’re trying to anticipate all the cat-and-mouse games that are going on, and you’re weighing that against, ‘Hey, we had a plan. Should we stick with the plan, or deviate from the plan?’”

Laurila: Maybe the plan against a certain hitter has a well-executed slider followed by an elevated fastball, but your instincts say otherwise….

Scherzer: “Yes. It could be, ‘I just saw something, so no, we’re going to go right back to the slider. Yeah, OK. I know we talked about slider-to-heater up, but based on what I just saw happen on this slider, we’re going right back to it.’”

Laurila: And when you throw it, you need to do so with full conviction….

Scherzer: “You can’t measure it. You can’t measure conviction, but you know how important it is. Talk to any pitcher, and they know it. They know what it feels like when they throw a very convicted pitch. They also know what it feels like to throw a pitch when they’re not 100% convicted.”

Laurila: As a veteran pitcher, can you tell when someone throws a pitch without conviction?

Scherzer: “Yeah. That’s the human eye. You see it happen with certain guys where… let’s say, first time through the lineup they look great. Then they come around the second time, and you’re seeing them kind of getting in between. They start making mistakes they weren’t making the first time through the lineup.

“After a game, you talk through that. It might be, ‘Oh man, I saw this the first time, so I wanted to try to do something else, but then I got in between on what I wanted to do.’ You don’t want any in-between thought. You want decisiveness.

“Mentally, it’s hard to be fully convicted on every pitch. I understand that. There are so many decisions to make within a game, so many little factors going into, and affecting, the sequences. But to be fully committed to each pitch… just how important that is gets overlooked, because it’s not quantifiable.”

Laurila: In a game where seemingly everything is being quantified…

Scherzer: “The art and science of pitching… we’ve got so many numbers, so much math, so much science to it. Guys are thinking about the game in totally different ways now, and sometimes we lack the art. We lack focusing on the art. We’re thinking like robots instead of thinking like a human, and trying to make decisions based on another human being in a box. That’s the challenge of pitching.”