Solid Week For the Nutrafol Crowd.
Oldheads unite. We can still play
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Way too much got made of Max Scherzer going crazy on his manager when John Schneider walked to the mound in the fifth inning Thursday night. For one thing, Scherzer is certifiable. They don’t call him Mad Max because it’s a cute tie-in to a Mel Gibson movie, put it that way.
For another, pitchers and emotional outbursts go together like PB and J at this time of year. October baseball is different, and pitchers are just generally maniacs in the first place. That is a combustible mix under the best of circumstances, and the middle of an American League Championship Series swing game is hardly the best of circumstances.
Anyway, Max did his ballistic thing.
Entertaining, as always. But here’s the thing: By focusing on Scherzer’s appearing ready to throw hands rather than come out of a game the Blue Jays desperately needed, we’re missing the much much MUCH bigger picture.
Max is 41 years old!
Fifth decade of life, and still bringing the competitive heat in a playoff game!
We are back, oldheads. We are so, so back.
In the end, Scherzer stayed around long enough to record the win. Toronto already had a 5-1 lead by the time Max threatened to murder* Schneider, and the Jays went on to tie the ALCS and ensure that the series would return to Canada no matter what happened in Game 5 in Seattle on Friday.
Oh: Schneider is barely four years older than Scherzer.
“I thought he was going to kill me. It was great,” Schneider said. “He locked eyes with me, both colors, as I walked out. It’s not fake. That’s the thing, this isn’t fake. He has that Mad Max persona, and he backed it up tonight.” (Scherzer has heterochromia iridis: one eye brown, the other blue.)
Scherzer gave up a single run in 5 2/3 innings, a performance more than enough for the Blue Jays, who cruised to an 8-2 victory. His fastball topped out at 96.5 mph, Scherzer’s best velocity in more than two years.
Max actually had a lousy season, pitching to a career-worst 5.19 ERA and making only 17 starts because of a recurring thumb injury, but we’re going to skip that part. For one night in October, we got the good stuff, vintage Scherzer, and it was glorious.
Even better, it happened on the same Thursday in which 40-year old NFL quarterback Joe Flacco outdueled 41-year-old QB Aaron Rodgers on national television. Flacco threw for 342 yards and three touchdowns in Cincinnati’s 31-30 win over first-place Pittsburgh, while Rodgers delivered four TDs and a 103.7 passer rating in the Steelers’ last-minute road loss.
It was such a solid graybeard evening. I’d call it heartwarming, but, you know, one of the guys was Aaron Rodgers.
(* = “Murder” feels like such an unhappy and possibly legally problematic word. Let’s stick with disembowel.)
It feels important to take a moment, draw in what we’re seeing. From the time that I was a kid, it’s safe to say that sports has constantly erased and redrawn its boundaries. That includes micro achievements like people regularly lowering world records (swimming, track and field, etc.) that feel impossible to beat, and it includes the macro, such as sports morphing from a decent little business to a mega-billion dollar global industry.
Too, we’re seeing — and already have seen — athletes on quests to find out just how long they can extend their careers and still perform at the highest levels.
At 41 years and 81 days, Max Scherzer became the fourth starting pitcher to win an MLB playoff game at age 41 or older; the others are Roger Clemens, Kenny Rogers and Dennis Martinez (way back in 1995). The kid who came in to relieve Scherzer in the sixth inning, Mason Fluharty, was 10 years old when Max made his first post-season appearance in 2011.
I’ve been wondering whether we will see more or less of this. On the one hand, advances in science, nutrition, training and analytics give today’s athletes the best opportunity they’ve ever had to take their careers deep into their 30s and even into their 40s in most of the major sports. On the other hand, the financial rewards are so enormous now that a lot of folks will have made generations’ worth of money by, say, age 35, and won’t feel compelled to go on.
LeBron James will begin this NBA season injured. Then again, James will be 41 in December, and he has played more minutes than anyone in the history of the NBA/ABA. And it’s cool when you look at that list: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (2nd) retired at 41, Karl Malone at 40, Dirk Nowitzki at 40, Kevin Garnett at 39. These are all recent-era players who still had something in the tank in their final seasons. May the trend continue. Makes us all feel a little better about things.