LOS ANGELES -- A longtime general manager once challenged some of the numbers presented to him by a statistical analyst in his front office. “Don’t tell me what happened, because I can figure that part out,” he told him. “Tell me what’s going to happen, because if you can do that, then we’re really onto something.”

But the GM said this knowing that he was asking for the impossible, because despite all of the formulas that have helped to improve baseball analysis since the days Bill James started publishing his handbooks, none of them can account for change -- the adjustments that players make mentally and physically, season to season, game to game, at-bat to at-bat, pitch to pitch.

Somebody finds a new pitch, a new angle, a more comfortable hitting position, a new methodology at the plate, and a lot of the numbers that a given player has accumulated up until that moment become obsolete.

Max Scherzer had a great arm at the University of Missouri, but his mechanics -- including a violent jerk of his head as he released the pitch -- scared some teams away, and may have even been a factor in the decision by the team that drafted him in 2006, the Diamondbacks, to deal him to Detroit. After his first four seasons in the big leagues, Scherzer was still something of a mystery; he would follow great starts with poor outings.

But Scherzer was devoted to making himself better.