When Justin Verlander was humming – and that was often in the meat of his Hall of Fame career – he pitched with haughty dominance, a calculating, cold-blooded efficiency. He was so calm for someone who could throw so hard.
That only made him more disorienting to hitters.
And when he thinks back – and he’s done a lot of that lately, mulling the do-or-die playoff games, the no-hitters, the complete games, the World Series rings, the 21 years in the majors, with the Detroit Tigers and others – he thinks about the competition as much as anything.
He’ll miss it. Terribly.
The showdowns against Derek Jeter and Mike Trout, the chess games against those pesky Kansas
City hitters – Billy Butler in particular – the punishment Jim Thome doled out when Verlander was young and trying to figure things out.
The Cleveland (among others) slugger got 'em seven times, then sent an autographed bat to Verlander’s home after he’d hit 600 home runs – a thanks for helping him reach the milestone. Verlander chuckled as he told the story to a room full of reporters Friday, Sept. 25, on the eve of the last outing of his career.
He can do that now. He can laugh and reminisce and feel grateful and express gratitude, as he did when he stepped to the podium set up near home plate, flowers encircling its base, his wife and daughter and son a few feet away, sitting in white folding chairs.
“Thank you,” he said, again and again, pausing to wipe tears, motioning to his current teammates, former teammates sitting behind his family, the fans.
This wasn’t always so easy for him. When he was younger, when he’d stalk through the clubhouse in oversized headphones, staring ahead like a shark, he thought he had to be that way.
He thought he had to scowl to be great.
Then he got a little older, and his daughter was born, and the coronavirus pandemic hit, and he missed time after Tommy John surgery, and he began to look around, and look at his daughter, and look at the way she looked back at him.
The adoration. The love. And when he returned to baseball in 2022, and tried on that old routine – “the intensity, the anger, not talking to anybody ...” – it didn’t work.
“It felt fake to me,” he said.
He was a different pitcher, and a different person, and when he takes the mound one final time at Comerica Park on Saturday (1:10 p.m., Detroit SportsNet), when he climbs the stairs of the dugout to the grass and looks to the crowd and takes it all in, he’ll think about the journey that led him here.
“What’s the point of living life if you don’t let life change you?” he said.
Willing it into existence
At his best, he was just about as good as anyone – ever. He arrived in Detroit in 2006 with triple-digit heat and a curve that bent like a river. It took him a while to use those gifts, and when he did – dialing that fastball back in early innings only to crank it up, inning by inning, to combine command and velocity like few in his generation – he was nearly unhittable.
“I could hit the [rear] of a gnat,” he joked.
He said this back in mid-June, as he sat before his stall at Progressive Field in Cleveland. This was on a Sunday before a game. The Tigers were scuffling and he was trying to work his way back from hip inflammation.
He was frustrated, but realistic, and relatively accepting. Whatever was going to come, would come. However his last season unfolded, he was going to absorb as many of the moments as he could.
He’d thrown 3⅔ innings to that point, all of 'em in Phoenix during a game in late March. It’d been his only regular-season start in this second Tigers stint, and despite his relative peace, he was getting antsy to get back on the mound, working behind the scenes to adjust his mechanics to help his hip, to fuel his fading arsenal, to get him through the rigors of a big-league season one more time.
That he was still in the big leagues was a kind of premonition. He never doubted he’d be here. At 43. Still on the mound. Nerves still tickling his gut. Imagining what it’ll be like to take the ball one last time.
“You’ve got to will that [expletive] into existence,” he said, smiling, philosophizing.
All grown up
Even when he was young, he would happily break down his outings, his mechanics, his adjustments. He always loved the prep, the physics, the craft.
But this was him breaking down life, at least how he saw it, and sees it now, and he was doing it again Friday in Detroit, first in one of his last formal media sessions, then at the makeshift podium near home plate, flanked by his family, his manager at two stops (A.J. Hinch), a former pitching coach (Jeff Jones) and even a former catcher (Alex Avila), who took a turn at the mic to speak about the privilege it was to squat behind home and call pitches for Verlander.
Scott Harris was there. Christopher Ilitch was there. Don Kelly – once a Tigers teammate, now the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Tigers’ final opponent of the season – ran over to get a few hugs, moments before Friday's ceremony and celebration started.
A life-sized replica of Verlander’s rookie baseball card stood behind the podium in the infield grass, next to a six-foot-tall cutout of his number: 35. That’ll be affixed to the brick wall in the outfield someday, not that Tiger fans who watched him pitch need it there to remember it.
Or him.
His outings were a happening, and though he never won a World Series wearing the Old English “D,” he helped get the Tigers to the last series of the season twice. More than that, he grew up here, going from a 21-year-old taken No. 2 in the 2004 MLB Draft to the 43-year-old voice of reason in the clubhouse.
The grownup showed humility and gratitude Friday night as he spoke, tipping his cap often. He no longer needs the headphones. Or the silence.
He discovered a different kind of energy along the way. And on the penultimate night of his remarkable career, expressed what he’s known in his heart all along:
“I am, and always will be, a Detroit Tiger.”
Contact Shawn Windsor: swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Justin Verlander goes from terror to tears for final start with Tigers
