BPro: Seidman: Max Scherzer talks about his own numbers-crunching.

20 Minutes into the Sabermetric Future...with Max.

MS: Last year my brother came across the whole BABIP theory and explained it to me, but I was initially very skeptical because I just could not imagine all pitchers were essentially the same. As my season went on, I kept an eye on it, and he was right—pitchers really do not have control over the balls put in play, [that’s on] the defense and luck. I’m very numbers-oriented myself, so I kept digging into this wealth of information. Sure enough, the K/BB and HR/9 were really the driving numbers behind the success of pitching. It really made sense to me, but the pitcher inside couldn’t comprehend that, of everything involved, just three outcomes can determine one’s success.

ES: So part of you embraces the BABIP and three outcomes of controllable skill, but the other part struggles to comprehend it. How do you deal with that?

MS: Well, I’ve been challenging Alex over and over on different scenarios to see how they affect the three outcomes, and it never seems to fail. By digging deeper and deeper into the numbers, it really has allowed me to take away the fear of failure.

ES: How so?

MS: I’m going to have success, and I will have failure. So when failure comes, it really has allowed me to brush it off and say it was meant to happen, and the next 10 batters will never do that. Basically, it has allowed me to be even more aggressive and work ahead better.