Do the Tigers know about Fangraphs?

He throws from a 3/4 arm slot, and he has a nasty habit of bringing his fingers down around the outside of the ball, especially on his slider. When he does that, he loses control and can hang things right out over the middle of the plate. When he stays on top of the ball, he’s fine. Mad Max is dominant and he locates the ball very well up, down, in and out. Bad Max hangs em and is prone to giving up the gopher ball more than almost any other pitcher in the league.

I wish he would either throw the slider to lefties or develop another pitch (he seems more like a cutter guy than a sinker guy or curveball guy) because a lefty getting around 3 ABs a game against a pitcher who only throws fastball-change is going to have a ton of success in later at-bats if that changeup isn’t elite (hint: it really isn’t elite). His struggles against lefties make perfect sense in this light.

I know that the slider is traditionally believed to not be as effective against opposite-handed batters, but that never stopped Randy Johnson from brutalizing righties with the slider for two decades. Scherzer’s slider obviously isn’t Big Unit Good, but it’s definitely a plus pitch and it would be nice if he at least mixed it in more than once or twice a game against the lefties. Maybe a backdoor slider in deep counts against a walkmonger like Swisher?

is that Max’s change-up and slider are breaking a bit earlier than last year.

It’s hard to use Pitchf/x to judge Max. His mechanics are so…bad…that it’s expected to see changes and have groupings that you’d expect to find normally not show with Max. The season data for Max isn’t much different for him this year than it was for him last year. I’m pretty sure I said this before in some article or long comment I’ve written before on him, but a guy with Max’s mechanics can only be a roller coaster starter at best, which is something we’ve seen from him in both his seasons.

You did a good job in pointing out that his release suggests that he has trouble finding a rhythm. That boils down to all the extra things he has himself do while pitching. Sometimes he hits all his checkpoints through his mechanics and throws a gem. Other times he decides to miss the left turn at Albuquerque (spelled that right first time!) and throw a total dud. It’s all his mechanics, and his are a total hinderence.

Now I’m not trying to say that Max is a bad pitcher. With Verlander as our one and Fister as our two, Scherzer makes an excellent number 3 in my opinion. But you don’t spend a bunch of money on him. And you most certainly wait til you get as much data on him as possible before deciding how much you should spend.