But two facts undercut that bit of logic: Two of those hits off Scherzer were home runs. And the Nationals, a team now familiar with offensive shortages, didn’t put a runner on second base until Josh Bell homered with one out in the ninth. The spark came too late.
So they lost to the Reds, 2-1, and were hushed by starter Tyler Mahle for 5⅓ innings, then reliever Tejay Antone for 2⅔ more. Bell grounded into a double play with a runner on first in the sixth. Yadiel Hernandez and Trea Turner swung to back-to-back strikeouts once Andrew Stevenson walked in the eighth. At that point, Scherzer was cooled down and watching a comeback that fell short.
“You probably don’t lose on one solo shot, but tonight I got beat on two solo shots,” Scherzer said, removing Washington’s bats from the equation. “I got outpitched. That’s just the way it went. That’s where, even though I had a lot of good stuff tonight, did a lot of things right, Mahle came in and threw better than me. You got to tip your hat to him.”
Scherzer thrived, as he often does, after not breaking from his pre-start routine. Just ask Georgetown University’s latest graduating class.
Whenever it looks back on Monday, there will always be that faint patter in the back of the videos. It is the sound of a pitcher so set in his routine, so fixed on treating his life like a metronome, that he was in right field, throwing with bullpen catcher Octavio Martinez, while Georgetown held its 2021 commencement at Nationals Park.
The sound was Scherzer firing a baseball to Martinez’s glove, over and over, before facing the Reds on Tuesday. The baseball fans were hooked. Other students and family members sat confused. Jackson Gillette, one of the 1,500 graduates, saw a message in a group text with a handful of classmates: “Do you see the guy pitching?”
Yeah, Gillette answered. Everyone did.
“He seemed totally unbothered,” said Gillette, who earned a degree in international political economy. “Most players would be kind of fazed by that, I think. He was doing his thing, and whether or not there was a huge ceremony going on, it didn’t matter. He just finished and walked into the dugout.”
This was one of many, many microsteps of Scherzer’s 14th season. His between-starts preparation is his gospel. He has cited it as a key reason for his longevity, which he has cited as a key reason for his mammoth strikeout total, which has him passing Hall of Famers — Cy Young one night, Jim Bunning the next — at age 36. Scherzer threw during a graduation because he had to. Or at least that’s what he tells himself.
The Reds, then, were just another team in his path. He entered the game with a 2.24 ERA through nine outings. He exited with it up a hair at 2.27. The offense just never chipped in.
Scherzer started by striking out four of the first six Reds he faced. The final pitch of each at-bat — a 95-mph fastball, a slider, a cutter and a change-up, in that order — got a hollow swing. Next his groove was cracked, if only for a moment, when Kyle Farmer pulled a first-pitch fastball into the left field seats in the third. It was cracked again, for another short hiccup, when Eugenio Suárez went deep on a change-up in the sixth. And once that ball cleared the wall, 13 of the 16 earned runs allowed by Scherzer this season had come via home runs.
“They are mistake pitches,” Scherzer said when asked if there’s any thread between the 10 home runs hit off him in 2021. “A fastball away that runs middle-in, that’s how I got beat against Farmer. And with Suárez, I pulled a change-up, left it middle-away, and that’s his strength. That’s how he hits the ball: He’s really good on thigh away. That change-up needs to be down and in. I feel like if I throw that pitch right, and throw it down and in, that’s a much better outcome for me. But homers are mistakes.”
The Reds’ two homers, though, could have been more of a speed bump than an insurmountable hole. The Nationals’ offense spent the weekend bashing in runs off the Baltimore Orioles. The Reds are one of two clubs, along with the Los Angeles Angels, that entered the week allowing more runs per game than Baltimore. But Mahle kept Washington to three hits and a walk and induced a lot of weak contact. He leaned on his four-seam fastball, slider and splitter to thrive.
Then in the sixth, after Mahle yielded a one-out, blooped single to Juan Soto, Reds Manager David Bell went to his bullpen. Antone needed one pitch to get Bell to bounce into an inning-ending double play. It was one of the Nationals’ best opportunities before Bell rocked Amir Garrett’s fastball out to left-center in the ninth.
They needed more of that, more often. It’s been a too common theme.
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Max Scherzer is strong, but Nationals’ bats lend little support in loss to Reds - The Washington Post
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