Shvitzy! Sticky! Suspended?

The man used sweat and rosin, he said. He said it a lot. He repeated it enough so that I believed him, which doesn’t always work. The pitcher doth protest too much, methinks might be applicable here, except the pitcher pitches for the Mets and Met-think is how methinks. Besides, this is Max Scherzer in his sixteenth season, the majority of those spent as an ace of aces. He’s suddenly sticking substance he’s not supposed to all over his pitching hand after several starts already this season when this didn’t seem to be an issue?

Pitchers will look for an edge, particularly late in their career, maybe if they haven’t been as sharp as all get-out, especially, you’d think, if the pitcher was coping with discomfort that had pushed back his spot in the rotation. Yet I’m not buying any of that as a likely explanation for whatever the umpires decided was awry in L.A. Wednesday. I don’t know that Max Scherzer is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever watched pitch in my life, but I do sense he is not, as he put it, enough of “an absolute idiot” to get checked for stickiness in the first place; be told to take care of it; take care of it as MLB officials inspected him taking care of it; and then return to the field with gobs of verboten goo.

Yet the man was ejected from the dual shutout he was engaging in with Noah Syndergaard, speaking of storylines shunted to the rear by umpire Phil Cuzzi, self-appointed crusader for clean living among pitchers. Max, who’d been missing from action for nine days, was rolling along after wriggling from trouble in the first inning. The second and third were so clean that you’d think they were scrubbed with alcohol. Max never saw the mound in the fourth, having been asked to remove himself from his place of business. When he’ll return is up for grabs in light of this sticky-wicket contretemps and the ten-game suspension it’s supposed to automatically trigger.

The Mets continued to play their game against the Dodgers on Wednesday afternoon, downgrading our half of the glamour of Scherzer v. Syndergaard to Yacabonis, et al…, not quite the same thing, but somehow efficient enough. Thor, as we used to call the opposing pitcher, wasn’t his old bowl of doom self in terms of velocity, but the wandering Norseman was effective if not evocative of the days when we hung on his every golden lock. Keeping his own once-famous ass out of the jackpot, Syndergaard gave up only a pair of runs in six innings, both scoring when Brandon Nimmo took him deep with Francisco Alvarez on first base. My first thought was how appropriate it was that Brandon should homer off Noah in that they used to be super buddy-buddy. My second thought was, wait, that was Conforto, not Nimmo.

It was all Nimmo, eventually. Brandon went 5-for-5 against Syndergaard and succeeding Dodger arms. Meanwhile, the post-Max pack, led for two-and-two-thirds by Jimmy the Yak, picked up the Scherzerless slack. A potential ace tour de force became a bullpen game, and for the last six innings, Jimmy Yacabonis plus Jeff Brigham, Drew Smith, David Robertson and Adam Ottavino did the best thing relief pitchers can do: they got the job done. Nimmo’s exploits worked in harmony with Mark Canha (two RBIs) and Tommy Pham (key sac fly) to bolster Max’s supporting cast en route to a 5-3 rubber game victory. Afterward, when Scherzer paused from claiming perfectly permissible “sweat and rosin” long enough to answer a question about how well Yacabonis pitched in his place on no notice, Max smiled and said the long reliever definitely deserved a steak dinner, presumably on him.

That’s really nice, assuming Max washes his hands before passing the potatoes.

The Mets are five games over .500, a level they never approached 60 years ago, but 1963 was its own kind of fascinating Mets year, as you’ll hear all about in the It Happens in Threes segment on the new episode of National League Town.