Scherzer still working hard, right down to final spring tune-up

Max Scherzer's final tune-up of spring training wasn't exactly his prototypical final Grapefruit League start. Though it happened at The Ballpark of the Palm Beaches, it was in a B game against an Astros lineup populated with minor leaguers and a few major league hitters. No fans were in attendance, meaning Scherzer's grunts and reactions were clearly audible, meaning the right-hander was in midseason form.

By all accounts, it was a good day's work. Eighty-nine pitches over six scoreless frames has positioned Scherzer for Thursday's opening night start against the Mets at Nationals Park. He'll be able to approach a triple-digit pitch count in his sixth opening day assignment for the Nationals.

To say Scherzer is looking forward to Thursday would be an understatement.

"Kinda like Christmas," he said via Zoom after his Saturday outing. "Everybody's excited, can't wait for that day to happen. You finally hit the regular season, you finally get going again. It's a real exciting day."

And even a veteran of 13 major league seasons admits to having a few butterflies as the big day approaches.

"I think everybody does. I don't necessarily call it butterflies. Everybody's anxious to get the season going," Scherzer said. "Everybody knows you're playing 162 games and this is the first one out. You know, that starting line. So your aces get going, you want to get your season going and you want to do everything you can. Everybody's anxious before the game, with all the ceremonies, everything that goes down with that. Just to be able to kick off the season, it's just fun to be out there."

Few pitchers prepare as diligently as Scherzer, so it should come as no surprise that his final spring outing - despite where and how it happened - still created an opportunity for the right-hander to turn introspective and examine what he was doing well and how he could do things better. That's Scherzer in a nutshell, and the site or opposition don't really factor into the process as much as Scherzer's self-examination.

"You're always making tweaks, you're always making little adjustments to what you're doing. ... This is normal to be able to make an adjustment like that," he said. "Like I said, from last start to this start, was able to make an adjustment on the slider and see the results in that. So that was the biggest bonus to pitching today and pitching with no fans. You gotta mentally bring it. B game becomes an A game in your mind. So that's how you gotta approach it."

Today's approach, in Scherzer's own words, was "slider-heavy" - his way of training all his energies on making sure one of his go-to offerings was in top form before Thursday's season opener.

"I felt good. The focus for me today was coming in and really making sure I've got my slider. Sink harder with more depth," Scherzer said. "I was able execute that today. That's all I was really gunning, to make sure I could execute it today and I was able to check that box. I was able to pitch with the other pitches as well, but there was a couple of times throughout the game where my hands weren't in synch with my mechanics. My hands were dragging and just got me a little bit side to side. ... The fastball was kinda missing arm-side a little bit at times and the changeup kinda wasn't 100 percent there all the time

"So there's some things I gotta tweak coming into, going in to opening day, but that's baseball. You're always making little tweaks like that throughout the year and I know exactly what I got to do. So one little last thing you're going to do to get sharp enough. To try to be as ready as possible for opening day."

Scherzer has reached the point of spring training where it's not good enough to just command each of his pitches. Now he's working on sequencing and execution, two factors that go hand-in-hand in determining whether he'll have a passable start or a dominating one. It's the game within the game that Scherzer craves because it displays his cerebral approach to throwing a baseball.

"I felt like today, coming in with the slider-heavy approach, that how I was throwing my slider - and, yes, that was great - and how I was throwing my changeup off my slider. I felt like that sequence, that was kind of exposing some of my flaws that I was doing," he said. "If I just throw a bunch of changeups, yeah, I can execute changeups. But when you have a slider (and) changeup, it's two different types of executions in how you have to do that. How you keep everything, keep your mechanics and keep your rhythm in your delivery.

"That's the challenge of having this many pitches is keeping all of them sharp when you're mixing. From curveball to slider, slider to changeup, then back to a fastball and back to a changeup. All those type of sequences that you have to do, the adjustments you have to make, you kind of recalibrate in between pitches of what's going on. You know, that's what goes on in the regular season, so that's where, as I'm ramping up in spring here, that's what I'm really paying attention to. How the sequences play and how the executions play off each other when you're facing hitters and what you're trying to do with the baseball. ... How you mentally execute it and how you physically execute it can sometimes blur. That's when you're really convicted to throw a pitch; it doesn't matter what pitch you throw, if you have the conviction, you're gonna throw it right."

More than anything, that's what Scherzer is aiming for in his upcoming opening day start against the Mets. After a 2020 season of pitching in empty stadiums, he much prefers having fans in the stands - even if it's just the 5,000 fans that will dot the landscape on South Capitol Street on Thursday, as opposed to the sellout crowds of more than 41,000 that usually pack the stadium for the first game of the season.

"There's fans in the stands here in D.C., so that's obviously going to be a plus to have some type of atmosphere there," he said. "And (it's) the start of the season - everybody gets butterflies on opening day. That's a good thing."