Justin Verlander’s career is as old as some of Baltimore’s starters, and he’s pitched against multiple generations of hitters in the same family — meaning he’s old. He’s got salt and pepper in his beard. Verlander reclining in a porch rocker wouldn’t look too out of place. Imagine that, at the end of the dugout, rocking back and forth with a blanket over his knees, whistling about the weather, about his joint pain, about this one time back in the day… Watching him take the hill every fifth day one can’t
help but think over the hill.
The geriatric jokes are endless, often over-the-top, a little reductive. As a 42 year old whose colleagues are often the age of seniors in college, I’m sure Verlander has heard it all before, laughing them off to hide away the deeper insecurities that must come with a middle-aged man trying to stay relevant playing a kid’s game, playing a game that’s so different from what it was 20+ years ago.
Long gone are those days of dominant performances. There is rarely ever any awe when Verlander walks off the mound. Any on-field achievements are one-offs, grounded in the past, about a career, checking off milestones and pulling himself up to the next rung on lifetime leaderboards.
In many ways, Verlander’s performance on Sunday was par for the course. The whole afternoon had been a slog. He held Baltimore scoreless through 4 innings but quick outs were few and far between. Two singles, three walks and eight strikeouts (and 27 foul balls) took their toll. He needed 94 pitches to finish off the 4th. Not to mention that the gametime temperature at first pitch was 84 degrees, that it’s nearly September.
I’m sure Bob Melvin asked him if he wanted to pull the plug, I mean, call it. Verlander didn’t need to go out for the 5th, not with a 7-run lead, nor did the team need to be aggressive with their bullpen. It was the veteran’s choice, and I’m sure the reason he went out for another inning was to make him eligible for the win — his 265th of his career. Verlander is an old dog. The value of Wins is ingrained in his early-aughts brain, and I’m sure there’s some part of him that believes he can still get to 300 — despite the fact that he started the year needing nearly 40 to reach that increasingly elusive mark.
Maybe Verlander chose to go out in the 5th because he thought he could pitch to contact, pick up an easy ‘W’ and inch closer to this “ultimate” goal, but something changed in the middle of the inning. Something shifted in the thinking. It became about something else.
Verlander got Daniel Johnson to ground out to second on five pitches for the first out. The second out took a lot longer. 21 year old Jackson Holliday worked himself out a 1-2 hole to earn a 7-pitch walk. This is when the tension of the inning started to ramp up. So much of what Verlander has been doing this year has felt inevitable. Notching 3500 strikeouts, passing certain legends like Walter Johnson on the leaderboard, were not about if but when. After he lost Holliday, the competitiveness kicked in. He wasn’t pitching for old times sake. This wasn’t the “senior” circuit. He worked his way into triple-digits, passing his season-high of 104 pitches thrown in a game. Nobody was going to give in or give anything to Verlander — he had to earn it.
In a 1-2 count, Jeremiah Jackson flipped a curveball off the end of his bat into shallow right for a single. Two runners on. Pitch count at 110+. Verlander paced down the back of the mound. He looked gassed. Melvin avoided eye-contact from the dugout. Kruk and Kuip quipped that the only person who could take Verlander out of the game was himself — anyone else would need a backhoe. Everything got pulled to the skin. The inning became about finishing something now, about muscling through an inning, about stranding runners, snapping breaking balls, shooting heaters, chasing swings-and-misses. Capital-P Pitching. Hitters were sitting on his 12-6 curve because he’d been stealing strikes with it all day. After Jackson dug one out from below the zone, he changed his approach. Five pitches in against Gunnar Henderson, in a 2-2, he froze one of the cover-boys of MLB The Show ‘25 with a surprise fastball — just 93 MPH perfectly placed at the knees. His ninth strikeout, the most he’s had in a start all year. At this point, Verlander had surpassed Logan Webb’s and Robbie Ray’s season-high pitch count. He was the workhorse now. The crowd buzzed with anticipation, willing their trusty steed forward as Ryan Mountcastle stepped into the box.
The showdown proved to be one of the easier at-bats of the afternoon. Just four pitches, which pushed him over the 120-pitch mark, where no other Giant pitcher had gone since Alex Cobb’s complete game, near no-hitter in 2023. His last pitch, a change-up, sold as a fastball by his arm action, peeled off the inside corner and sent Mountcastle packing.
The crowd erupted as if he had just thrown a complete game. Verlander shook his head and smirked as he walked off the mound talking to himself. It might as well have been the game. With that final strikeout he became the oldest Giant to record 10-strikeouts in a game. He hadn’t thrown as many pitches in a game since June 2018. It was the 73rd time he bagged double-digit strikeouts in a start, the 58th time he threw 120+ pitches in a game, and only the second time, the first since 2010, that he needed as many to get through just 5 innings.
Verlander was right: it’s laughable. A ridiculous amount of work to record just 15 outs, and to do on the eve of September in a game in which they already led by seven runs (and would eventually score 13 and win by 11) for a team on the periphery (at best) of the postseason reason. We all know statistical wins mean nothing. But damn…that final change-up was pretty badass. Absolutely worth it. The 5th might as well have been the 9th. The umps should’ve just called it after that.
The Giants erased Saturday from their team-wide consciousness and returned to Friday form, taking the series with a 13-2 win. Rafael Devers launched his 28th homer in the 1st, and collected his 92nd and 93rd RBI. He and Ramos teamed up for six hits between them, and Drew Gilbert, starting in center, drove in 3 on 3 hits with the help of dubious defense from the Orioles.
Thanks Baltimore, now off to Colorado.
