Max Scherzer and the Blue Jays got a non-answer on Saturday, and it was the honest kind. The right-hander said he'll wait until the offseason to decide whether he wants to pitch a 20th major league season in 2027. Not a retirement speech. Not a commitment. A man asking for time.
That's a fair thing to ask for in late September, when every pitcher alive is running on fumes and adrenaline in roughly equal measure. Ask a 42-year-old starter in a September clubhouse whether he wants to do it all again and you're going to get a body's answer, not a mind's. Scherzer knows that better than anyone. He's been doing this since 2008.
What Max Scherzer's Blue Jays season means for a 20th year
Here's the arithmetic that makes the headline work. Scherzer debuted with Arizona in 2008. Count the summers since and you land on 19. So 2027 would be the twentieth, and twentieth seasons are not handed out. They're survived into.
The résumé behind the question is the part worth sitting with. Three Cy Young Awards, the 2013 American League version in Detroit and back-to-back National League trophies in Washington. Two World Series rings, one with the 2019 Nationals and one with the 2023 Rangers. Two no-hitters in a single 2015 season. More than 3,000 career strikeouts, a number that used to be a Hall of Fame password and now feels like a footnote next to the rest of it.
checked the almanac: on may 11, 2016, scherzer struck out 20 tigers in nine innings at nationals park. twenty. the single-game record for a nine inning start, tied, against the organization that traded him. you don't get a second one of those.
Why the decision waits until the offseason
Pitching at this age is a negotiation, and Scherzer has clearly been conducting his. I don't have his full workload log in front of me and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but the shape of the thing is familiar to anyone who has watched a great starter get old in public. The stuff comes and goes. The preparation gets longer. The recovery window that used to be four days starts asking for five, and then six.
What doesn't change is the competitiveness, which in Scherzer's case has always run closer to a controlled fire than a personality trait. This is a man who has argued with umpires, managers, hitters, and on at least one famous occasion his own manager about coming out of a game. That guy does not retire in a hallway after a Saturday afternoon question. That guy goes home, lets the season drain out of his arm, and finds out in January whether the itch is still there.
Toronto signed him ahead of 2025 knowing exactly what they were getting: a competitor with a Hall of Fame floor and an injury-report ceiling. The Jays have Cincinnati in town this afternoon, and if this is the end of Scherzer's time in that uniform, he'd be the last one to announce it from a podium in September.
What comes next for Scherzer
The interesting wrinkle is that he framed this as a question of whether he wants to, which is a different question than whether someone will have him. Teams have wanted Max Scherzer for 19 years. Wanting it back, every February, through a spring training at 43 years old, is the harder half.
I hope he goes again. Not because the numbers demand it, they don't, and a career like this doesn't need a coda to be complete. Because there are maybe a handful of pitchers alive who still treat a Tuesday start like a knife fight, and when one of them leaves, the game gets a little quieter. For the love of the game, give me one more spring of that.
What I'm watching next: whether he takes the ball again before this season closes, and what he says on the way out of the clubhouse when it does. Men who are done usually tell you without meaning to.