Confirmed deal : Yankees Show Interest in $130 Million Free Agent Future Hall of Fame Ex-Mets Ace

The 2024-2025 Major League Baseball offseason is drawing to a close, with teams opening Spring Training camps in just 15 days. Of the dozens of free agents who started the period looking for new teams and new contracts, only a fraction remain unsigned. That includes most of the big-name pitchers. Corbin Burnes signed with the Arizona Diamonbacks. Max Fried is now a New York Yankee. Roki Sasaki joined the Los Angeles Dodgers. And so on.

But of all the free agent pitchers who hit the market this offseason, none has had a better career than Max Scherzer, with one possible exception. But the certain Hall of Famer is now 40 years old and was plagued by a series of injuries that restricted him to just 43 1/3 innings last season, his first full year with the Texas Rangers. That was the lowest workload of Scherzer’s 17-year career, including his rookie year of 2008 with Arizona when he threw 56 innings, and even the truncated 2020 COVID season when he recorded 67 1/3 innings.

Scherzer’s 2,878 career innings are more than any pitcher whose career began after the year 2000, with the exception of Scherzer’s former Detroit Tigers teammate Justin Verlander — the only active pitcher whose career compares to Scherzer’s. Verlander was also a free agent this offseason and has signed with the San Francisco Giants.

 

 

Scherzer insists that he can return to the mound in 2025 and get back to his old self — and the New York Yankees may agree.

“I still believe I can pitch at a high level here. There’s nothing stopping me from doing that,” Scherzer said late last season, which was cut short for him when he went back on the injured list with a hamstring strain, after nerve issues and his ongoing recovery from back surgery deprived him of time on the mound earlier in the season.