Did Max Scherzer Really Have His Breakout in 2012?

Max Scherzer was on my fantasy baseball team in 2013. (Note: I recognize you don’t care about my fantasy team. This is in the service of a point, I promise.) My fantasy baseball team that year won the league championship, and Scherzer was a big reason why. I don’t remember if I thought to myself during the draft, “Hey, this guy is going to be really good because he had a 78 xFIP- last year,” or if I said, “Hey, whatever, it’s a late round, this pick won’t really matter. Why not take a flyer on this guy?” Scherzer wasn’t really much of anybody the year before, which is why I could get him late in my draft. Sure, he had a 3.74 ERA in 2012, and he won 16 games, but he certainly didn’t have the hype he does now.

Fast-forward to this offseason. Sooner or later, a real-life team will acquire Scherzer. He will be expensive, there’s no doubting that. And rightly so. Scherzer has established himself as one of the best pitchers in baseball. A true ace who has put up consecutive 5.5-win seasons, Scherzer now has a whole lot more value than pre-2013 Scherzer, who showed signs of promise but was just another pitcher who couldn’t put it together.

But how different is Scherzer now than he was two years ago? He’s two years older, of course. He’s a free-agent — as opposed to having two more years of team control. And he’s had three consecutive good (or better) years, instead of just one. But when you look closely, Scherzer is a very similar pitcher to who he was even before his Cy Young-winning 2013 campaign. And that’s not a bad thing.

In fact, Scherzer has been good for all six complete years of his career. You might not think of him as the kind of guy who’s been tossing like an above-average pitcher for six years now, because you probably never paid much attention to him when he was giving up earned runs at a 4.43-per-nine clip. But apart from a blip in 2011 where he put up “only” 2.6 WAR, he’s been under 90 FIP- and xFIP-, and under 95 ERA-, every season since his first full season in 2009.

That’s a pretty good pitcher, if you ask me. I would love to have one of those seasons on my team. He struck out more than one out of every five batters he saw in every one of those years, and he walked fewer than one in every 11. He got screwed over by some bad defense and some bad luck — although some of that may have been his fault — but that changed in 2013 and his career took off.

The 2013 season was fantastic for both Scherzer and DIPS advocates in the sense they had a new poster boy in the “pitchers whose breakouts could have been foreseen because of their fielding-independent stats” department. The general baseball public’s hype machine cares little for BABIP and much more for wins and losses, so it was no wonder that Scherzer became so much more well-known when he won his first 13 decisions and ran up a 2.90 ERA. Nobody cared his BABIP was a career-low, anomalous .259 even pitching in front of an atrocious Detroit Tigers defense (they ranked 24th in the majors with -32.3 runs saved).

But behind those Cy Young-worthy numbers was another story: Not necessarily one of extreme luck, but rather one that begged the question of what had changed that year that allowed Scherzer to realize his true, previously unfulfilled potential.

The answer is not luck — or at the very least, not an excessive amount of it. It is instead a combination of the end of a run of bad luck as well as a bit of extra skill. But 2012 could very well have been Scherzer’s “breakout” season if not for things outside his control not going his way.

Look at how similar each of Scherzer’s 2012, 2013 and 2014 seasons are to each other. Here are many of his peripheral stats, the ones that indicate most accurately how well he was pitching but may not have indicated how many runs he was allowing:

• K%: 2012 – 29.4, 2013 – 28.7, 2014 – 27.9
• BB%: 7.6, 6.7, 7.0
• GB%: 36.5, 36.3, 36.7
• xFIP: 3.23, 3.16, 3.12
• Fastball velocity: 94.2, 93.3, 92.8
• O-Swing%: 28.8, 29.3, 29.8
• Contact%: 73.8, 74.1, 75.3
• Zone%: 51.8, 52.0, 51.9

Yes, there are some slight changes from year to year. The most notable statistic that stands out in 2013 as not being part of a trend is his walk rate, which drops nearly a full percentage point, only to increase by a tick the next year.

Strikeout rate, fastball velocity, contact rate – these are all actually trending the wrong way. Ground-ball rate and in-zone rate seem to be extremely steady. His xFIP, O-Swing% and BB% seem to be trending in the right way. But it’s really very minor. If we assume these are all reflective of Scherzer’s true talent — and there aren’t really many other easy ways to measure that — we can see Scherzer is an extremely similar pitcher to the Scherzer from three years ago.

There are only two things that I can pinpoint as having changed to benefit Scherzer in 2013, one of which may be a result of a change in his skill and another which most certainly is not. The first one is his HR/FB%, and the other is his BABIP. Here are those two, year by year, since 2012:

• HR/FB%: 11.6%, 7.6%, 7.5%
• BABIP: .333, .259, .315

I don’t know how to explain the sustained HR/FB decrease. That, out of the two, is probably less likely to be a fluke. It’s entirely possible Scherzer made a change to his pitching style to bring that number down. After all, using his career numbers as inputs, the p-value for two consecutive years with that HR/FB rate is only 0.0664, or 6.64% (in other words, there is just a 6.64% likelihood that that occurred by chance). It certainly wasn’t his home field, since Comerica Park’s park factor for home runs has remained exactly 100 for each of those years. But given that the year-to-year correlation (r) for home-run-per-fly-ball rate is a meager 0.09, I think it’s more likely luck was the driving factor.

So I can offer no explanation for that. It may be luck, it may not be, and we may never know for sure. I can, however, say with great confidence that Scherzer’s .259 BABIP in 2013 was an extreme outlier. There are some explanations for it (a 14% decrease in LD% and an almost 50% decrease in hits IFH%), but the explanations give no further reason to expect that something changed. The fact his BABIP went back up to .315 last year pretty much confirms that 2013’s BABIP was some pretty great luck.

So why did I say that Scherzer’s 2013 as a whole wasn’t a result of great luck, if BABIP was the driving force of his low ERA and the BABIP was a result of great luck? Because Scherzer’s 2013 was so good that if he didn’t pitch at the level of being able to maintain a .259 BABIP, he pitched at a level so that a .259 BABIP was necessary in order to counter other bad luck and give him an ERA that reflected his actual skill.

There’s a specific reason for that: Scherzer was the victim of some pretty bad sequencing in 2013. FanGraphs credits him with having lost two wins from sequencing that year (the LOB-Wins category in the Value section of his player page). Two wins is actually a lot of wins. Meanwhile, he was credited with having gained 1.8 wins from his BABIP luck (BIP-Wins). Those essentially cancelled out, leaving us with a pitcher whose ERA really is a good measure of his true skill. Comparing his ERA and FIP just corroborates that claim; he had a 71 ERA- and a 68 FIP-. (As a comparison, the sum of Scherzer’s BIP-Wins and LOB-Wins was -0.9 in 2012, which is more proof that he was very unlucky that year.)

So here is the full picture of Scherzer’s past three years. He pitched very well in 2012, but had some horrible luck with BABIP and wasn’t particularly effective at keeping fly balls in the yard. This led to a decent year, but not a great one. He pitched just as well in 2013 with the exception of experiencing a sharp decrease both in BABIP and HR/FB, which may have had a little bit to do with an increase in skill, but not to a great degree. And then, in 2014, he had once again an excellent year, only it was not quite as good, and his BABIP fortune from the previous year abandoned him and left him with an ERA just over three.

You can argue Scherzer’s HR/FB% drop has not been a result of luck. If you want to say that, then Scherzer really did break out in 2013. But that seems unlikely. And if that’s not the case, then Scherzer truly has been nearly the exact same pitcher for the last three seasons, and that pitcher has been elite. Scherzer may never have been a top prospect (he was ranked in BA’s top 100 once, No. 66 in 2008), but he was always a talented pitcher, and in the past three years it has all come together — and thankfully for him, it’s really come together in the past two, which conveniently come right before he hits free agency.

You didn’t need me to tell you that Max Scherzer is very good. But maybe you did need to know that Max Scherzer has been who Max Scherzer is for longer than you may have expected. You may not have thought much about him before 2013, if only because hype is reserved for pitchers who put up gaudy win numbers and ERAs with a 1 or a 2 before the dot. But even without those two hallmarks of a well-known hurler, Scherzer was good – and then he got them and became Max Scherzer, the staff ace.