For Max Scherzer and a lockout-shaken MLB, change doesn't have to be bad: 'Nothing lasts forever'

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WASHINGTON – Max Scherzer was talking about his own odd homecoming and facing his former World Series champion teammates as an opponent and division rival, but he could have been talking about Opening Day, and baseball, and the ongoing examination of who this game’s for and to whom it should cater.

“Nothing lasts forever,” he said Friday afternoon, standing as a New York Met in the visiting clubhouse at Nationals Park, a day before he climbs the mound as a visitor.

No, Scherzer was dealt from the team where he spent seven seasons, won a pair of Cy Young Awards and helped author a startling 2019 World Series championship. Ultimately, he was paid $43.3 million over three seasons to expunge the last of a Superfund site in Queens.

And his first start as a Met is as good an example as any of how Opening Day and this 2022 season amplify both the fear and glory of baseball’s impermanence.

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Scherzer’s start will be consumed not on your D.C. and New York-area broadcast networks but rather something called Apple TV Plus, Major League Baseball’s latest stab at, as they say, meeting their young fans where they are. It’s a development that has irked no shortage of fans wondering why their cable bill or $100-plus annual tithe to MLB.TV isn’t sufficient enough to watch their team – or any team – wherever and however they want.

It’s a plight the game finds itself in often these days: Reward the hardcore fan or tempt the casual one?

The 99-day lockout that shoved this first slate of openers from late March into April pushed many of these conflicts to the core, many of them of an internal nature – players pondering whether to loosen restrictions on older stars, or pay a larger wage to younger ones. Owners wondering what cost solidarity when they have to grit their teeth and scratch revenue-sharing and tax checks to benefit peers seemingly too happy to cash them.

Fans, weary after two years of a pandemic, weren’t heard very loudly during the lockout, which was both reassuring and unsettling. Are we past the days of 1994-95, when many vowed to never come back after a World Series was canceled? Is labor jousting so expected that there was a wake-me-when-it’s-over element to it?

As April and May turn to summer, we will have a better read on whether baseball’s invisibility gave way to indifference, or fans’ loyalty held firm.

Then again…

“There’s no loyalty in the game,” Yankees first baseman Anthony Rizzo bluntly declared Thursday, speaking of star teammate Aaron Judge and the likelihood he tests free agency rather than strike an extension deal.

Rizzo knows from loyalty, seeing he and his Cubs pals tendered extension deals they deemed insufficient before all were shipped off last summer. Freddie Freeman and the Braves? Kevin Gausman and the mutually beneficial Giants? The A’s and anyone remotely resembling an All-Star?

Gone, all of them.

Of course, this is nothing new. Free agency has been more a boon than a bane for the game in its nearly 50 years. It’s been about half that long since Seinfeld declared it was laundry, not humans, we rooted for. And again, it’s unclear what the fan wants.

The return to prominence of a hot stove season that’s been surpassed by the NBA’s July bacchanal of transactions? The undying loyalty of homegrown stars, Just Like It Used To Be?

No, change is inevitable, and it doesn’t always have to be bad. We won’t totally know if it’s because of arcane new rules dropped into the collective bargaining agreement, or years of shaming and guilting the worst offenders, or actual competition-motivated baseball decisions, but this year’s best rookies by and large started the year where they belonged.

In the big leagues.

For the first time in decades, service-time suppression took an L, and celebrated prospects like Julio Rodriguez (Mariners), Spencer Torkelson (Tigers) and Bobby Witt Jr. (Royals) went north with the big club, rather than spend a two-week charade in the minors so their overlords could harvest a seventh year of service out of them.

Thursday, on a day the Royals welcomed salty veteran Zack Greinke to the fold with an Opening Day start, Witt easily turned around a fastball for an RBI double that pushed across the go-ahead run in a win over Cleveland.

A year ago, he might not have been there, and the Royals might not have started their year so gloriously.

Yes, sometimes change is inevitable. And as Scherzer pulls on his blue Mets road top and faces down Juan Soto for the first time, embracing what he says will be a “crazy-wild” atmosphere, he knows that change doesn’t always have to be bad.