Max Scherzer Addresses His 2008 Baseball America Scouting Report

Max Scherzer has had a Hall of Fame-quality career. Now with the Toronto Blue Jays, the 40-year-old right-hander has accumulated 73.0 WAR to go with 216 wins and a 133 ERA+ across his 18 big league seasons. Moreover, his 3,408 strikeouts rank 11th all time, and his résumé also includes three Cy Young Awards, eight All-Star selections, and a pair of World Series rings. Writing about his Cooperstown chances last summer, my esteemed colleague Jay Jaffe called Scherzer “a lock for election.”

Let’s turn the clock back to 2007, when Scherzer made his professional debut that summer a full year after he was drafted 11th overall by the Arizona Diamondbacks out of the University of Missouri. The following spring, Scherzer was ranked fourth in the D-backs system when Baseball America’s 2008 Prospect Handbook was published. Rankings and in-depth scouting reports weren’t yet a thing here at FanGraphs.

What did Scherzer’s 2008 Baseball America scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think of it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what BA’s Will Lingo wrote and asked Scherzer to respond to it.

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“The 11th overall pick in 2006, Scherzer pitched for the independent Fort Worth Cats and held out before he would have reentered the draft pool.”

“That’s right,” replied Scherzer. “Now that you think about it, the rules have changed since then, but when I got drafted by the Diamondbacks… actually, let’s go back to pre-draft. That season, my junior year, I slammed a door on my finger. I tried to pitch through it and developed biceps tendonitis. That scared off a lot of teams.

“I came back at the end of the year and pitched well, so I went into the draft saying that I was still looking for a top-college-pitcher contract. That was when you could still sign major league contracts out of the draft, and it’s what I told teams I was looking for. Arizona drafted me under those pretenses, but then tried to tell me I was hurt. I was like, ‘You guys literally just saw me at the Big 12 tournament. Everything is back. I’m good.’ I let them know that I wasn’t going to take 11th-pick slot; I was looking for a major league contract, which is what the top college pitchers in the past few years had gotten.

“They said no. I had the option go back to school, but when I talked it over with Scott [Boras], he said, ‘Let’s go the independent ball route.’ He’d that done with Luke Hochevar, who’d been the no. 1 pick the previous year, and it had worked out. Dallas was a great location for me, so I took that opportunity. I trained all offseason, simulated on my own, got built up, got there and pitched well as a Fort Worth Cat. Then I ended up signing. It was five minutes before the [May 30, 2007] deadline. Arizona gave me a major league contract.”

“Scherzer’s fastball can overmatch batters, arriving in the mid-90s with sinking action at its best.”

“Yes and no,” Scherzer said of that line’s accuracy. “It was right about the mid-90s, but I’ve never thrown a sinker. I’ve never thrown a two-seamer; I’ve always had a four. They used to say, ‘He has an invisible fastball.’ Now they would say, ‘He has a high-spin fastball.’

“The knock on me was that I had too much effort in my delivery, and that I had this head snap. I remember always saying, ‘No, I snap my head down to make the ball go up.’ Now we’ve kind of put it all together. Yeah, I would snap my head down, but it was getting me to put force down into the ball and create more spin, causing the ball to rise.”

“His slider can also be a plus pitch, though he’s working on its command and plane.”

“Yeah, that’s accurate,” Scherzer said. “I had a very inconsistent slider. Actually, my changeup was probably ahead of my slider when I got to the big leagues. I had more feel for it. There were times where I threw good sliders, but also times where I would get around it, or it was bigger… it was just a very inconsistent pitch. I didn’t solidify my slider until 2012. It was several years of working at that pitch.”

“Some scouts who saw Scherzer as a starter at mid-season wondered what the fuss was about. His fastball sat in the 89-93 range, and his overall stuff, command, feel, and delivery all drew questions.”

“Yep,” the righty replied. “When I got to Double-A with the Diamondbacks, they completely took my lifting away from what I did in college. They didn’t believe in lifting weights. That Double-A summer, instead of it being a mid-90s fastball it fell down to 89-93. I just wasn’t the same guy. So, that September I went back to lifting. I knew that I was going to the Fall League, so I worked hard all September to get ready for that. I pitched really well in the Fall League.”

“Then they saw him relieving in the Arizona Fall League and he was a different pitcher, touching 98 mph. Arizona’s official opinion is that Scherzer is a starter.”

“So, Arizona starts coming at me like, ‘No, you’re a reliever,’” Scherzer recalled. “And I was like, ‘No, I just need to lift.’ I could throw 98-99 on the 100th pitch. My hardest fastball could be at the 100th pitch. I remember having that heated debate with them, saying, ‘No. If you just let me lift, let me do my program, I’m a starter. I can pitch deep into a game. I can carry my velo deep into a game. I’m not a reliever. You don’t need to look at me like that.’”

“If he moves to the bullpen, he could provide immediate help in the big leagues, and has the pure stuff to eventually close games.”

“That’s always been kind of fascinating, envisioning me as a closer,” Scherzer said. “To some degree, that was true. The only reason I never fully entertained that was because I knew I could carry velocity deep into games. Again, I just needed my lifting program so that I was strong enough to do that. When I got traded to Detroit [in December 2009], they basically said, ‘Yeah, go do your program.’ From there, I was able to continue to develop. To this day, lifting is a part of my routine. I don’t want to be in a training room, I want to be in the weight room.”

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Previous “Old Scouting Reports Revisited” interviews can be found through these links: Cody Bellinger, Matthew Boyd, Dylan Cease, Matt Chapman, Erick Fedde, Randal Grichuk, Ian Happ, Jeff Hoffman, Matthew Liberatore.