Why Max Scherzer’s home-run issues may be more than a blip

For most of Max Scherzer’s limited time as a Toronto Blue Jay, the prevailing wisdom was that as long as he stayed healthy, he’d be effective.

But cracks are starting to emerge in the validity of that assumption.

Scherzer has conceded four earned runs in each of his last three starts, encountering back tightness in his second-most recent outing — that he reportedly continues to feel — before tipping his pitches the last time he took the mound.

This stretch ahead of his Saturday start against the Baltimore Orioles, which pushed his ERA from 3.60 to 4.36, could just be a case of short-term misfortune for the future Hall of Famer, but it’s also possible that some of the warning signs in his underlying numbers are starting to come to the forefront.

Concerns about the 41-year-old must start with the home run. The three-run shot that derailed his start on Monday may have been the result of pitching tipping more than anything else, but the long ball has dogged Scherzer all year. Among the 169 pitchers who’ve logged at least 70 innings this season, his 1.94 HR/9 ranks sixth-highest. 

In most cases, a number that much higher than the league average (1.18 HR/9) indicates a pitcher is due for some positive regression, but things are a bit hazier with Scherzer. 

Keeping the ball in the park has been a persistent issue in his late career. His 1.70 HR/9 since the beginning of the 2023 season is the third-highest among pitchers who’ve worked 250-plus innings. 

Even if we put some of the recent history aside, within this season alone, Scherzer’s issues with homers aren’t altogether surprising. 

Of that aforementioned group of 164 pitchers with at least 70 IP in 2025, his flyball percentage (57.6 per cent) is the highest. When a pitcher is allowing a ton of home runs, it’s usually due to a disproportionate number of flies against them clearing the wall. Jeff Hoffman’s struggles in this area are a good example of this: 21.4 per cent of his flyballs allowed are going for home runs after that number sat below 10 per cent in each of the past three seasons.

Conversely, Scherzer’s HR/FB (13.2 per cent) is only narrowly above league average (11.8 per cent).

The 41-year-old doesn’t seem to be getting unlucky on home runs so much as the raw amount of flyballs he’s allowing has made giving up at least one home run per start a statistical likelihood. He’s conceded at least one long ball in 11 of his 14 outings as a Blue Jay, and it’s reached a point where his success often depends on how crowded the bases are when the near-invitable big fly happens.

To Scherzer’s credit, his low walk rate helps ease the traffic, and his extreme flyball rate puts downward pressure on how many balls in play result in hits, but it’s a dangerous way to be doing business.

And it’s particularly perilous when you’re not limiting the total number of balls in play by posting high strikeout rates. Prior to punching out eight Yankees on Monday, Scherzer had posted his lowest K/9 over a six-game stretch in more than 10 seasons:

While his overall season-long number looks respectable (8.48 K/9), his 30th percentile whiff rate tells the story of a pitcher who can’t be trusted to post an excellent strikeout rate. A big reason for that seems to be his inability to get hitters to chase out of the zone, where hitters fail to make contact far more often. This season, the MLB average contact rate on in-zone pitches is 85.5 per cent, while it sits at 55.5 per cent on offerings outside the zone. 

In the his previous 10 seasons, Scherzer’s chase rate was 67th percentile or better each time, often reaching the 90s. This season it’s 15th. One possible explanation is that Scherzer’s pitch-tipping issues have gone beyond his start against the Yankees, but it seems likely that diminished movement on his pitches is leading to less deception.

Because Scherzer’s velocity has bounced back from his injury-plagued 2024, the assumption is that his ‘stuff’ is back, but that might be an oversimplification. When it comes to both vertical and horizontal movement, a number of his pitches have seen notable drop-offs, resulting in a situation where not one of his pitches has movement even an inch above average in either direction:

Not all of the declines here are particularly notable. For example, just 28 of Scherzer’s pitches have been classified as cutters this season, so a horizontal movement decline isn’t notable, and a lack of armside run on his four-seam fastball is also unlikely to hurt him too much.

Losing more than five inches of drop on both his changeup and curveball from last season is consequential, though, and the run value on those two offerings is a combined minus-8 this season. 

Those pitches not having as much juice make the biggest impact in matchups with left-handed hitters since they are Scherzer’s second- and third-most used pitches, as his more reliable slider takes a back seat. That dynamic could help explain these splits:

It’s been a fascinating Blue Jays tenure for Scherzer, which began with some surprise about his choice of Toronto as a landing spot, featured months of consternation over his thumb, and recently included a run of six consecutive starts of six innings or more with a 2.84 ERA.

There have been times this year when Scherzer looked like a sunk cost for the Blue Jays and others when he appeared to be a viable Game 1 playoff starter. Right now, neither one of those extreme characterizations fits.

As he gears up for his 15th start of the season, his ERA (4.36) is narrowly above league average for a starter (4.22), and his xERA (4.29) suggests that’s approximately what he deserves. That number probably undersells what he can do when he’s feeling at his best physically, but it’s also far from a given that he will be 100 per cent on any given day, considering his age and what he’s been through in recent years. 

There was a time this season when he looked like he might be Toronto’s best starter on a per-inning basis, but Kevin Gausman’s recent brilliance, the acquisition of Shane Bieber and Scherzer’s home-run struggles have put that idea to rest. 

Instead, the goal is to stabilize his performance enough to turn his presence in the playoff rotation from a likelihood into a certainty.

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