TORONTO – Dylan Cease made a point to learn all he could during the season he spent with Max Scherzer and really came to enjoy the future Hall of Famer’s many, many opinions about pitching, specifically, and baseball more generously.
“He has a lot of takes,” the right-hander said with a grin.
Among Cease’s favourites, one he feels Major League Baseball would never adopt, is a pitch minimum for starters, aimed at resetting the way pitching is developed. But what the Toronto Blue Jays ace really appreciates about Scherzer’s ideas is that “he has a thought-out track of logic that actually makes sense, too, so you're like, OK.”
“You have to understand because he is such an intense competitor, he doesn't do the in-between,” Cease continued. “He looks at everything and if you're not as intense as him, you're not going to understand. He comes from an, I don't want to say extreme, but even look at the results he's accomplished in his career, they are extreme, because that is his intensity, that's his energy. He is extreme, so he's going to have extreme opinions and take some things, and you either respect that or you look at it like, it's whatever. I respect it because it's hard to argue the results. Am I saying he's always, right? I don't know, but he's got really interesting opinions, for sure.”
Cease’s timely piece of insight felt particularly prescient Sunday, when Scherzer once again accomplished the extreme in another vintage Mad Max performance, a seven-inning, one-run, seven-strikeout, 114-pitch gem on only three days of rest, at age 42, in what may have been the final start of his career.
Win No. 225, in a 5-1 victory over the Cincinnati Reds, even included one last mid-inning manager stare-down, when at 104 pitches with two outs in the seventh inning, John Schneider came out to discuss what to do. A crowd of 42,131 booed him every step of the way and as they jeered, Scherzer “was like, man, I want to stay in this game, too, you hear that and it makes you want to go.”
“He came out, he's like, ‘Hey, if you get this guy, you've got to go out for the eighth,’” Scherzer continued. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I feel good. I feel great. So we're good.’ I will admit, the Rogers Centre booing definitely helped me want to stay in that game.”
Scherzer got Will Banfield on a soft popper to second to end that frame, muttered something to the effect of I’m not coming out of this game on his way into the dugout, and then came back out for the eighth, leaving after a leadoff walk to Oswaldo Cabrera. This time, there was no scowl as Schneider approached, the two embraced and Scherzer walked off the mound to a standing ovation, saluted the relievers who came out of the bullpen to applaud him, hugged his way through the dugout, sharing a long embrace with George Springer, also likely playing his final game, and then hugged his family in the stands.
Other than wanting to pull him in the middle of an inning, the Blue Jays didn’t have a script for how long Scherzer would go Sunday. As only he can, he wrote a wild ending.
“In-between innings, he said, ‘Hey, I'm good until someone gets on base.’ And that was kind of a no-brainer,” said Schneider. “It was the weakest call to the bullpen ever for me, I used my pinky, just like, all right. But he got it and (Mason Fluharty) did a great job and I told Max on the mound when he was coming out, just thank you for letting me be part of your unbelievable career and I wouldn't want any other 42-year-old psychopath on my team other than you.”
The seven strikeouts pushed his career total to 3,557, leaving him three shy of Justin Verlander, who punched out six over 5.1 innings Saturday in the final start of his career, for eighth all-time. In 501 big-league outings, 492 starts, Scherzer has a 3.29 ERA over 3,047.2 innings with a 1.09 WHIP, along with three Cy Young Awards, eight all-star selections and two World Series titles. Over the final two months of the 2026 season, he posted a 4.16 ERA in 62.2 starts with 54 strikeouts, showing that when healthy there’s still gas in the tank.
That’s partly why he’s deferring a decision on his future, as he doesn’t want to become a prisoner of the moment, pointing out that “in the beginning part of the year, when I'm hurt and everything, it's like, all right, how do we just get to the end of the season, and it doesn't seem like it (will happen), things were kind of bad.”
“As the year went on and I came back and I was healthy and then all of a sudden everything clicked and I feel perfect, I don't have any ailments going on across my body whatsoever. And it's been like this for about six weeks,” he continued. “And so, we kind of had (conversations), like, hey, we just need to make this decision later, this needs to be something that happens in the off-season, because with the ebbs and flows of the season, everything can make you think one way. When you get away from baseball, you get a little bit more clarity of your decision-making.
“We were like that last year, how everything was unfolding, respect the process on how this will go down,” he added. “I just feel like at that time I'm going to know whether I'm ready to want to lace them back up or call it a career. I don't have to make that decision today. Really see how it's going to unfold in the off-season.”
If it was the end, it was very much the way you’d expect Scherzer to go out.
Before the game, he gave Schneider a portrait of his far more famous Mad Max outburst on the mound during Game 4 of the ALCS versus the Seattle Mariners last October, inscribing it with the words he uttered at his manager during the visit. Are you insane, get off the mound is the PG gist of the message, recreated Sunday, for old times’ sake.
“In the moment last year, I thought it was hilarious. Probably wasn't the best time to think something was hilarious, but I did,” Springer said of watching Scherzer in Seattle. “And then, standard Max, he does it again and he goes out there and throws an inning more. That's just who he is.
“He knows he doesn't have what he once had, but in his mind, he still has it, if that makes sense,” Springer added later. “He's smart. He knows how to navigate an order not just once or twice, but three or four times if he has to. He waits. He sets guys up, or at least from what I've experienced, he knows exactly what he needs to do. That's why he's been so good for so long and whenever he decides to hang 'em up, in five short years he'll be a Hall of Famer.”
Added Schneider: “You look at a 42-year-old Hall of Famer pitching on three days' rest, throwing 114 pitches in the last game of the year. If that doesn't sum up Max Scherzer, I don't know what does.”
Scherzer didn’t want to end his season after allowing four runs in five innings Wednesday at Baltimore. On short rest, with his wife Erica and their four kids in the stands, he made it count.
"I wanted to have my family here, pitch here at Rogers Centre, have this type of game, not this in Baltimore, on a rainout, 1 p.m. with 5,000 fans. No, that's not right,” said Scherzer. “I wanted to do it today. To have them here and be able to see them and all the smiles on their faces, I think they got a couple of game balls, too, it was just really cool all the way around.”
3:33
2:15
3:55