I don’t know how many of you had a chance to see, or hear about, Max Scherzer’s 4.3 perfect relief innings two days ago against the Astros, but they were nothing short of sensational. He had seven strikeouts and there wasn’t a single Astros hitter he didn’t get the best of. For those of you who missed it, you can find highlights here.

I was so intrigued that I decided to run Scherzer through the pitch F/X mill to see what we could see. The Mizzou righty had a solid, if inconsistent, debut last season after signing late (one Diamondbacks scout I spoke with told me he went to bed the night before the deadline thinking the deal wouldn’t get done). This season, though, he broke out in a big way, posting this line at Triple-A Tucson: 23 innings, 12 hits, 3 ER, 38/3 K/BB ratio. Note that these stats were from just four starts. The Diamondbacks are confident he will still be a starter, and recently GM Josh Byrnes was quoted as saying, “We’re optimistic that he can be a quality major-league starter and probably prefer that that’s the focus at this point.”

For Scherzer to become a starter basically requires two things. First, he needs to show that he has an adequate repertoire of pitches, and second, he needs to show he can keep his command. As for the second point, I think he has quieted his critics a good bit by posting that 12.7 K/BB ratio (!) at Tucson. As for the first, well, I’m going to let the data speak for themselves. Scherzer’s two primary offerings are a fastball with sink and a hard slider. Here are his pitches from Tuesday night (click to enlarge).

The blue and green cluster in the upper-middle region is a straight fastball. He topped out at 98.3 MPH on the pitch F/X tracker, which is much more reliable than many of the inflated gun numbers you see on TV. Slightly below and to the left of that grouping are the sinkers. These were also all very fast, as none of them clocked in below 93 MPH. The fact that they are below the straight fastballs is how we can identify them as sinkers. (Those of you counting at home, we’re up to two devastating pitches.) Further down and to the left, we find the hard slider. The slider was working at 85-87 MPH, and while he didn’t use it much, he did get Miguel Tejada to whiff hard on one for strike three. Most curious to me, though, is the cluster of five pitches in the bottom right corner. I had heard he was working on a change-up, but this pitch is a solid 15 MPH slower than his straight fastball, and it breaks in the opposite direction of his slider. It looks like, instead of developing a change-up, he’s developed a splitter. He wasn’t able to locate for strikes as consistently as he could his other pitches, but he did get it across for called strikes twice in the game. If he can command that arsenal–straight FB, sinker, slider, and splitter–he will be a very good major league starter. If he cannot, he will be a very good major league closer. As a college product, he is fairly well polished and it looks as though he is ready to make an impact for the Diamondbacks immediately.

Max Scherzer photograph used under a Creative Commons license from flickr user tclifton.