Wednesday night, 18th September, at Busch Stadium sees Adam Wainwright face up against Max Scherzer in a game which is pivotal to both the St Louis Cardinals and Washington Nationals hopes of making the playoffs in 2019. As of today, 17th September, the Cards sit atop the NL Central with a 2 game advantage over the second placed Chicago Cubs and the Nationals are second in the NL East with a half-game lead over the Cubs for the first wildcard spot.
So whom better to close out the series than hall-of-fame bound Max Scherzer for the Nats facing up with the St Louis Cardinals multi-year rotation ace of the staff Adam Wainwright. This will be only the 2nd ever matchup between the two pitchers, with the first taking place in 2008 where the Cardinals came away with a 4 – 2 win against the Diamondbacks at Busch Stadium.
So although the two pitchers have only started against each other once in their careers, they’re both Stalwarts in the major league and have been around for a long time!
Adam Wainwright joined the league in 2005 when he was brought up to the majors at the end of the 05 season and has been a mainstay in the rotation for the Cards from then onwards never joining another team. Waino has been given a call-up to 3 all-star games and has 2 second and 1 third place finish in the CY Young voting, being pipped to the prize by Roy Halladay once and Clayton Kershaw twice.
Max Scherzer on the other hand has moved around the leagues, first being brought into the majors by the Arizona Diamondbacks during the 2008 season (who drafted him 11th in the first round in the 2006 draft). He then moved to Detroit in 2010 as part of a 3 team trade with the Yankees that moved Curtis Granderson to the Big Apple and Ian Kennedy & Edwin Jackson to Arizona. After 5 years at Detroit, Mad Max then moved to the Washington Nationals in 2015 via the free agent market signing a 7 year $210 million deal. Scherzer has gotten 7 all-star call-ups in his illustrious career and has won the CY Young award on 3 occasions to date.
Looking at both players against each other, they have both been very consistent throughout their careers with Adam amassing 380 games, 313 of which have been as a starter, and getting 160 wins in the process. With Scherzer consistently starting at least 30 games a year since his first full season in 2009 and has amassed 363 games, 354 of which are as a starter, and has gotten 169 wins. So looking at their full career in the majors, Waino has a 42.1% win percentage, whereas Scherzer has a 46.6% win percentage in all games they’ve pitched in. Comparing their wins by age, we see through age 28 the two were very close with only 7 wins difference between them. But from age 29 onwards, Scherzer has kicked on with at least 14 wins a season to create a differential between himself and Waino.
When comparing the career ERA of the two, Wainwright has a career 3.37ERA which is a marginal .19 above Scherzer’s 3.18 career ERA so they’re comparable here. When looking at their age comparison of ERA for both of the aces, they’ve both had ERAs well below the average for the majority of their careers and Waino again had a strong period aged 25 – 29, but Scherzer has maintained his dominance a little later into his career.
In addition, when looking into home runs allowed and strikeouts pitched, Max has been a lot more susceptible to the long ball allowing over 90 more homers than Uncle Charlie in less than 200 additional innings, but has a much superior strikeout rate with 10.6 strikeouts per 9 innings pitched, compared to the 7.6 SO/9 for Waino.
Finally, we look into Wins Above Replacement (WAR) which is the most common metric for identifying how many wins a certain player adds over a replacement level player, specifically for this we are using fWAR from Fangraphs which better incorporates various factors for pitchers. Looking at this, we see at present Scherzer has a 58.6 career fWAR, whereas Waino has a 40.4 fWAR over his career, with Waino having had just 4 seasons with a higher fWAR than Scherzer since Max joined the league in 2008 (namely 2008, 2009, 2010 & 2013). This vast gap in WAR is likely the major differentiator between the two and why Max is Hall-of-fame bound, whereas Wainwright will certainly be heading to the HOF, but it’ll just be the one in the Cardinals museum.
So looking ahead to the matchup on Wednesday, since the start of September Waino has been on fire with a 0.45ERA in his three September games allowing no HR, whereas Scherzer has a 4.24ERA in his three September games allowing 2HR. Additionally in 2019, Waino has been excellent at Busch Stadium having a 2.26ERA over 14 games which is mirrored by a 2.26 Away ERA for Max over 11 games.
Finally when analysing how each pitcher has fared against the opposing team, Waino has a 3.34ERA against the Nats and Scherzer has a 2.95ERA against the Cards. Among teams pitched against with at least 10 games played, the Nationals are Wainos 7th worst ERA, whereas the Cards are Scherzers 9th worst ERA of teams with at least 10 games played.
So how do the Cards go about beating the Nationals? As strong as Wainwright has pitched this year, the highlight of the 2019 season for the St Louis Cardinals has been their bullpen which has been the best in the National League and the 3rd best in the majors with a 3.73ERA. Comparatively, the Nationals have the worst bullpen in the major leagues with a 5.91ERA and this is likely the way in which the Cards can take the series win here. If the offense can ring up a high pitch count for Max Scherzer in the early innings, and get the bullpen into the game by the 5th / 6th inning, this will allow the offense to jump on the Nationals lowly bullpen and try and force the win from there!
Taking all of this into account, it should be a really interesting game to close out the series with the Nationals and move us, hopefully, a step closer to October and the first taste of postseason baseball in St Louis since 2015!
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed!
Matt Benson, Gateway Analytics Ltd.
@STLAnalyticsUK
