World Series: Texas Rangers need Max Scherzer to pivot the series back to Texas

The Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks resume the World Series on Monday night in Arizona with Max Scherzer facing rookie Brandon Pfaadt. Game three is typically a pivot point in any best-of-seven series. The stat says that when a series is tied 1-1 the winner of of game three wins the series 69% of the time. Tonight's game will give the winning team a massive edge in this World Series. For Texas, it will be up to Max Scherzer to give Texas not just length, but quality tonight. Max really needs to do these three things to give Texas a great chance to win.

What can Max Scherzer do to help Texas win game 3?

#1 First Pitch Strikes

Arizona lives on getting ahead in the count and hitting pitches in counts that are in their favor. Both Eovaldi and Montgomery did a fine job with throwing first pitch strikes to this lineup. Max has to continue that in game three. This Arizona lineup is not the Houston lineup, but they are still challenging in a much different way. Wheras Houston could bludgeon a team to death, Arizona is a team that is a death by a thousand cuts sort of lineup. They will single and double a team to death. That is exactly what we saw in game two when the Diamondbacks racked up 16 hits.

Eovaldi and Montgomery in their starts finished with a higher than 50% first strike rate. They had more success when they were getting ahead in the count rather than behind. If Max can do that he will have a similar amount of success as those two had and be able to keep Texas in the game into the late innings.