Scherzer makes everyone dream of something special again

PHILADELPHIA - This is what it has come to, what Max Scherzer has done to our longstanding sense of baseball and how typically not to get too excited too soon about the possibility of history.

Two innings into tonight's 3-2 Nationals victory at Citizens Bank Park, only two measly innings into this one, you couldn't help but think to yourself: Scherzer might just throw a no-hitter.

That's not the kind of thought you're supposed to have after two innings. Or, if you do, you're supposed to immediately remind yourself it's not appropriate to give credence to such thoughts until much later in the evening. At least not until the fifth or sixth.

Scherzer, though, has changed the dynamic. What we have come to train our brains after a lifetime watching baseball does not apply when the 32-year-old right-hander is on the mound.

"Oh, yeah, if a guy has done it a number of times," manager Dusty Baker said. "It's different if a guy hadn't done it. But about the fourth or fifth, the way he was dealing and his pitch count was low, right away I'm sure everybody on the team was thinking it because they've seen it before."

We all have seen it before from Scherzer, more times than we may even be able to remember. Tonight he carried a no-hitter into the sixth inning for the ninth time in 61 starts as a member of the Nationals. Stop for a moment and process that. Basically, every seventh time Scherzer takes the mound, he pitches at least five no-hit innings.

"It's hard not to think of something special going on in any of these games when he's pitching like this," batterymate Wilson Ramos said, via interpreter Octavio Martinez.

The script is all too familiar at this point. Scherzer blows away the competition in the first couple of innings, striking out a bunch of batters in succession, keeping his pitch count low. At that point, it's simply a matter of how far he'll go before the first base hit drops in ... if it ever does.

For the Phillies tonight, that didn't happen until the bottom of the sixth. To that point, Scherzer had retired 15 of the 16 batters he faced, Cameron Rupp's one-out walk in the fifth the lone blemish. He had seven strikeouts, five of them coming in consecutive fashion in the second and third innings. His pitch count entering the sixth was a scant 53.

"I knew I was throwing the ball well," Scherzer said. "I knew I had all the pitches working. I knew I could go out there and keep different looks going multiple times through the lineup, and really sequence guys right."

Then came a pesky No. 8 hitter named Freddy Galvis, who opened the bottom of the sixth with a line drive double into the right field corner, breaking up Scherzer's run at a third career no-hitter. And if that felt at all familiar to anyone involved, it most certainly was.

Just one year ago - the date was June 26, 2015, to be precise - Scherzer carried a no-hitter into the sixth inning at Citizens Bank Park. He had just no-hit the Pirates five days earlier after nearly no-hitting the Brewers his previous start before that.

That's when Galvis sent a line drive double into the right field corner, a near carbon copy of his hit tonight.

"This lineup, they've got some pesky little lefties in there that can grind at-bats away," Scherzer said. "They've got some power, so if you make mistakes, they burn you."

A much larger lefty, Ryan Howard, burned Scherzer the following inning, when he blasted a two-run, opposite-field homer to make the Nationals sweat out a one-run lead the rest of the night.

But as he has done so many times in his two seasons in D.C., Scherzer finished strong. After the Howard homer, he retired five straight batters, striking out pinch-hitter Tommy Joseph to end the eighth and end his start at 102 pitches.

"Hey, man, he can smell it," Baker said. "Usually when he gets some runs, it's a shutdown inning. He doesn't give it right back."

Scherzer now owns a 15-7 record and 2.89 ERA. He leads the league with 238 strikeouts in only 190 innings. He puts fewer men on base (0.91 WHIP) than any other starter in the National League.

And yet again, he made anyone who was watching start seriously thinking about the possibility of something magical, only a handful of minutes after taking the mound to throw his first pitch.

"If there's a guy that I want on the bump in an important game, it's going to be him," right fielder Bryce Harper said. "Somebody that goes out there and pounds the strike zone. He has faith in his stuff. It's just a lot of fun to play behind."