The 2024-2025 Major League Baseball offseason is drawing to a close, with teams opening Spring Training camps in just 15 days. Of the dozens of free agents who started the period looking for new teams and new contracts, only a fraction remain unsigned. That includes most of the big-name pitchers. Corbin Burnes signed with the Arizona Diamonbacks. Max Fried is now a New York Yankee. Roki Sasaki joined the Los Angeles Dodgers. And so on.
But of all the free agent pitchers who hit the market this offseason, none has had a better career than Max Scherzer, with one possible exception. But the certain Hall of Famer is now 40 years old and was plagued by a series of injuries that restricted him to just 43 1/3 innings last season, his first full year with the Texas Rangers. That was the lowest workload of Scherzer’s 17-year career, including his rookie year of 2008 with Arizona when he threw 56 innings, and even the truncated 2020 COVID season when he recorded 67 1/3 innings.
Scherzer’s 2,878 career innings are more than any pitcher whose career began after the year 2000, with the exception of Scherzer’s former Detroit Tigers teammate Justin Verlander â the only active pitcher whose career compares to Scherzer’s. Verlander was also a free agent this offseason and has signed with the San Francisco Giants.
Scherzer: ‘Still Believe I Can Pitch at a High Level’
Scherzer insists that he can return to the mound in 2025 and get back to his old self â and the New York Yankees may agree.
âI still believe I can pitch at a high level here. There’s nothing stopping me from doing that,â Scherzer said late last season, which was cut short for him when he went back on the injured list with a hamstring strain, after nerve issues and his ongoing recovery from back surgery deprived him of time on the mound earlier in the season.
Scherzer has been training at Cressey Sports Performance in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, where the facility held a “pro day” earlier this week. Scherzer threw a bullpen session during the event with scouts from the Yankees as well as several other teams on hand to assess his readiness to return to the big leagues. According to Mets beat reporter Pat Ragazzo of SI.com, the scouts “liked what they saw.”
Besides the Yankees, observers from the Mets, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers, Toronto Blue Jays, Philadelphia Phillies, Atlanta Braves, and Chicago Cubs were also at the Florida facility to take in the Scherzer mound session, according to Ragazzo’s report.
Scherzer Likely to Seek a 8-Figure Contract
What would Scherzer cost? Before the 2022 season, the then-37-year-old righty inked a three-year, $130 million deal with the Mets. In the middle of 2023, the Mets decided to shed payroll and dealt Scherzer to the Texas Rangers, agreeing to cover about $31 million of his $43.3 million salary for 2024.
There is clearly no way the Yankees or anyone are about to pay Scherzer anything near the $30 million range. Using Verlander’s one-year, $15 million contract with the Giants as a benchmark, but taking Scherzer’s recent injury-prone history into account, something in the low eight figures for one year seems probable.
Is it worth it? There will be no way to know until Scherzer takes the mound at Yankee Stadium, or wherever he ends up. But what is certain is that the Yankees would be acquiring a future Hall of Famer and three-time Cy Young Award winner who ranks 11th on the all-time strikeouts list with 3,407 for his career. His lifetime ERA of 3.16 is second among active pitchers with at least 2,000 innings. And his strikeout rate of 10.7 per nine innings pitched ranks fifth all-time â but first among pitchers with at least 2,000 innings.
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