Bryce Harper, another former teammate, took a five-pitch walk, passing on fastballs outside the zone. Trea Turner, Scherzer’s former teammate in Washington, deposited a slider into left field for a one-out single. Scherzer dealt with trouble in the first inning. The defending National League champions assembled a lineup with six left-handed hitters, most of them with decent power. Laggard since the outset of the year, the Phillies supplied at least the hint of a threat. But the Mets are unlikely to meet much top-shelf competition in the National League this season, as the mediocrity of the senior circuit should aid their postseason ambitions. The Nationals, Guardians, Rockies and Phillies all have losing records. The quality of competition has not exactly invoked fear. In that four-start stretch, he struck out 28 and walked just four. After a six-week stretch marred by scattershot command and nagging injuries, he has permitted three runs in his past 25 innings across four outings. Scherzer completed the seventh inning for the second game in a row, and the second time in 2023. Justin Verlander, the team’s other weathered ace, can continue the streak when he takes the mound against Toronto on Friday evening. The team is now 16-0 when its starting pitcher logs six innings. In the process, Scherzer (5-2, 3.21 ERA) continued another encouraging trend for the Mets (30-27). He even had the energy for a postgame rant about a quirk of the pitch clock.
He credited rookie catcher Francisco Álvarez for confounding the Phillies with the sequencing of his three offspeed pitches, which led to 15 swings and misses against his fastball. What he could do, on Thursday, was record a season-high tally of nine strikeouts. “I’m just pitching like myself,” Scherzer said after the Mets swept Philadelphia at Citi Field. By Thursday afternoon, after Scherzer supplied seven innings of two-run baseball in a 4-2 victory over the Phillies, he was healed and capable of reminding folks why the Mets extended him a record-shattering, two-year, $86.87 million deal two winters ago. There was less discomfort in his start against Colorado last week. The wound created a “lot of pain,” Scherzer said after facing Cleveland on May 21. He was still dealing with blisters in his next outing. Two weeks ago, a callus on Max Scherzer’s thumb split open. If Showalter needed proof of his theory, he could have pointed to the right hand of his starting pitcher. “You notice you get older, you don’t heal as well?” Showalter said.
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