VIERA, Fla. — Max Scherzer has a request as Opening Day draws near. It is polite, and it is reasonable. But there is one tiny little problem.
Grant this request, and armchair hardball history professors will need to cool their jets.
"Let's talk about how great we are after the season," Scherzer told Bleacher Report this spring. "Let's have a great season, and then talk.
"Until then, nothing matters."
That this Washington Nationals rotation is set up to rank among the best in the game's history is beyond dispute.
When a club is coming off a 96-win season and a division title and then rolls out $210 million to bring Scherzer aboard a rotation that already includes Stephen Strasburg, Jordan Zimmermann, Doug Fister and Gio Gonzalez, the World-Series-or-Bust stakes could not be more clear.
That this also could turn into one colossally spectacular swing-and-miss—the outsized 2015 Nationals downsized to a historical footnote—also is well within reason.
All you have to do is flip the calendar back a couple of seasons to the 2010-11 Philadelphia Phillies.
Coming off consecutive World Series appearances in 2008-09—winning it all, of course, in '08—the Phillies loaded up. They built what everyone agreed was an invincible rotation that included Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels and Roy Oswalt.
Then, they failed to even advance to a World Series.
Now, all that remains is ticker tape-less memories.
"What it really comes down to is timing," says Hamels, who today is awaiting a trade out of Philadelphia while the hapless Phillies rebuild. "We still had the best rotation in the game. But for us, timing mattered.
"It's a team game, and the whole team has to go in the same direction. We did feel like we had the best rotation in all of baseball. But you have to have the whole team get on board, and the team has to play as a team.
"I think we've seen it in the past five World Series. The winner was not necessarily the team with the most awards and the most statistics."
Says Lee, who will start the season on the 60-day disabled list and may be facing the end of his career: "It was a lot of fun. You had a whole rotation, basically, in their prime. We had a chance to win every night. We saved the bullpen a ton."
But how do you square regular-season dominance and postseason failure? Or, do you? Can you?
The Phillies won 97 games in 2010 and 102 more in 2011.
Yet they were beaten in the 2010 NLCS by a San Francisco Giants team that won it all. Then they lost an epic 1-0 Game 5 in a 2011 NL Division Series in which Halladay was outdueled by the Cardinals' Chris Carpenter.
"I don't know that anything went wrong," Rich Dubee, the Phillies pitching coach at the time and now the Braves' minor league pitching coordinator, says. "We came up on the short end. A couple of other teams outplayed us. We ran into a real hot team in 2011 with Cardinals. Both years, the teams that beat us won the World Series. It wasn't like we lost to someone who didn't belong there. We lost to a couple of very, very good teams."
The 2011 Phillies rotation (Halladay, Lee, Hamels, Oswalt and Vance Worley/Kyle Kendrick) led the majors with a 2.87 ERA, 1,064.2 innings pitched, a 1.11 WHIP, 932 strikeouts, 18 complete games, 76 wins and seven shutouts.
Not since 1985, when the Dodgers posted a 2.71 ERA and the Mets a 2.84 ERA, had a big league rotation compiled a lower ERA.
Yet the fact that the 2011 Phillies could not even advance past the Division Series is Exhibit A that nothing is promised in this game.
"I think you always view it as a failure if you don't win the last game of the season," Dubee says. "But 102 wins speaks for itself. Seattle won 116 one year (2001) and didn't get very far. Maybe they thought that was a disappointing year.
"You have to be playing your best at the right moment. We played well, won 102 and then ran up against a team playing better than it should have."
Especially in 2011, with Halladay, Lee, Hamels and Oswalt—and a lineup that included still-in-their-primes Jimmy Rollins, Ryan Howard and Chase Utley (Utley, though, would play in only 103 games because of injuries)—the Phillies appeared indestructible. At the time, they were reminiscent of the great Atlanta Braves teams with John Smoltz, Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine.
Indestructible? Invincible? You might recall that those Braves teams only won one World Series crown despite 14 consecutive division titles.
But from April through September….
"Teams would come in for a four-game series and you'd get Hamels, Oswalt, Lee and Halladay," Larry Andersen, the former reliever and current Phillies broadcaster, says. "And it was like, 'OK, what game are we going to have a chance to win?'
"It's intimidating. I think hitters will tell you that they'll feast on mediocre pitching and try to hold their heads at the water line, or above water, with tough pitchers. Then they'd get here and get Lee, Halladay, Oswalt and Hamels, and it was like, 'Oh, come on. Give me a chance here.'
"I think the mere mention of facing the Phillies in a series, much like it's going to be with the Nationals, you're not going to get a day off. You're not going to face mediocrity."
The Phillies staff was a little older, experienced and more decorated than the current Nationals staff.
By 2011, Philadelphia starters had collected a total of three Cy Young awards (Halladay in 2003 and 2010; Lee in 2008), two NLCS MVP awards (Hamels in 2008; Oswalt in 2005), one World Series MVP (Hamels in 2008) and 10 top-five Cy Young Award finishes.
Coming into this season, Nationals starters have a total of one Cy Young (Scherzer in 2013) and no playoff or World Series MVP awards.
The Phillies in 2011 had established older pitchers in Halladay (34), Oswalt (33) and Lee (32) to help lead the younger Hamels (27), Kendrick (26) and Worley (23).
Halladay led more by example than by taking young pitchers under his wing. Kendrick, in particular, would copy as much as he could, from Halladay's 5 a.m. spring training arrivals and early-morning workouts to his between-starts routine.
"If Halladay's doing it, I'm going to do it," is how Andersen remembers it. "We would joke: Is Kendrick going to wear the same clothes as Halladay, too?' I respect and appreciate Kyle for doing that."
At 30, maybe Scherzer brings a little of that veteran savvy to the Nationals, too.
"He's obviously got a lot of good insight into the game," Strasburg says. "He's very analytical. He knows the game very well."
The other thing about an uber-rotation is inevitably the starters wind up pushing each other and working toward outdoing the others each start. It takes an elite competitor and, usually, an alpha male to reach the pinnacle. Like the Phillies, the Nationals are stacked with them.
"A lot of guys look at it that way," Lee says. "I personally don't. It doesn't matter what motivates you, and a lot of guys do try to keep up with the other starters.
"I try to put up zeroes no matter what. It doesn't matter what the guy ahead of me did."
In Washington's camp, Zimmermann, who went 14-5 with a 2.66 ERA in 32 starts last season, acknowledges the internal competition.
"That's the way I go about it," he says. "If someone goes seven, I want to do a little better the next night.
"If everyone's on board trying to do that, it's going to be a good year. I feel like every one of us could start Opening Day."
Last week, Nationals manager Matt Williams not unexpectedly chose Scherzer for that honor. Strasburg has started the past three season-openers for Washington, but given Scherzer's pedigree and price tag, his assignment for Opening Day was about as surprising as gridlock over on Capitol Hill.
The Nationals spent the spring getting to know Scherzer, and vice versa. And since signing with them, on a staff full of legitimate No. 1s and 2s, Scherzer has bristled at any sort of ranking.
"Absolutely ridiculous notion," he says. "Who cares? There's no reason to think that way. Every one of these guys is extremely talented and can win. I'm just here to continue the chain."
He continues: "I've been so fortunate in my career. I've been on unbelievable staffs. In Arizona, I was with Brandon Webb and Randy Johnson. In Detroit, I was with Justin Verlander, David Price, Anibal Sanchez and Rick Porcello.
"I've been so blessed to be a part of these things, and what's beautiful is you get to see how they attack the same guys you go against. They might have a different way you can emulate.
"And they're as talented here as any rotation I've ever been a part of."
Clearly, no matter how stacked on the mound, no team is going to go 162-0. But when a rotation is as good as that of the Nationals this year, or the Phillies in 2010 and 2011, players take the field each night thinking they are going to win that game. And that confidence that Bryce Harper, Ryan Zimmerman, Jayson Werth, Ian Desmond, Anthony Rendon and Co. will have adds up over a summer.
"I think it did wonders for our position players," Dubee says of those Phillies teams. "Every night, we had a horse going out there. They could have scraped two, three, four runs across and we'd still have a real good chance of winning.
"Over 162 games, that extra energy your starting pitching gives you goes long way for position players."
The Nationals will feel that energy every night this summer, from the optimism of Opening Day to the dog days of August to the stretch run and push into October. But it guarantees nothing when the leaves begin to change and the autumn chill takes hold.
"Last year we had one of the best rotations in the game," Zimmermann says of a rotation that produced the majors' best ERA (3.04) and WHIP (1.14). "I feel this year with Max will be the same."
"You never know," says Scherzer, whose Tigers teams were beaten in the World Series in 2012 and in three consecutive ALCS from 2011-13. "I completely get it. You don't win on paper. There's no such thing as a paper championship.
"You have to win on the field. I've been on great teams the last four years."
Scherzer pauses, and grins. You know, he says, there is one more ingredient that always is welcome, no matter how great the rotation.
"A little two-out hitting never hurts."
Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.
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