Justin Verlander's last act on a major league mound was handing the baseball to a 7-year-old. That is how a 21-year career ended Saturday in Detroit: an unexpected hook, his daughter walking out to the mound to take the ball, hugs all the way to the dugout rail, and a Tigers club that rallied behind him to beat the Pirates 4-3.
Managers have pulled starters ten thousand different ways. I have never seen one delegate it.
What happened in Justin Verlander's final start
The reporting out of Detroit says the hook was a surprise to Verlander himself, which is the part that makes it land. He is the most prepared human being to ever stand on a pitching rubber, a guy who has known the inning he was coming out of a ballgame since roughly the Bush administration, and the one time the answer got kept from him it arrived in the form of his daughter, the child of Verlander and model Kate Upton, walking out of the dugout with the whole ballpark realizing what was happening about a half second before he did.
Teary farewell is how the wire put it. Fair enough. He earned the right to be a mess about it.
And then the Tigers went and won the thing 4-3, which matters more than it sounds. A farewell start where the team gets rolled is a wake with bunting on it. This one turned into a ballgame.
Why Detroit was the right place for Verlander to finish
Because it is where the whole thing started, and because baseball almost never lets you have that.
Verlander came up with the Tigers, won AL Rookie of the Year in 2006, and pitched Detroit into a World Series in his first full season. He threw a no-hitter at Comerica against the Brewers in 2007 and another one in Toronto in 2011. That 2011 season is still the one that stops a room: Cy Young and Most Valuable Player in the same year, a starting pitcher walking off with the MVP trophy.
Checked the almanac on that one. The last pitcher to win an AL MVP before him was Dennis Eckersley in 1992, and Eckersley was a closer. You have to go back further than that to find a starter who did it.
A few of the markers, not the whole ledger:
| Year | The marker |
|---|---|
| 2006 | AL Rookie of the Year, Tigers reach the World Series |
| 2007 | No-hitter vs. Milwaukee at Comerica Park |
| 2011 | No-hitter in Toronto, plus AL Cy Young and AL MVP |
| 2017 | World Series title with Houston |
| 2019 | Third career no-hitter, second Cy Young |
| 2022 | Third Cy Young, second World Series title |
The middle chapters happened elsewhere. Houston, New York, the West Coast, a Tommy John surgery in there that most pitchers do not come back from at that age, let alone come back and win a Cy Young. But he closed the loop in the same building where he opened it, and that is not sentiment, that is scheduling luck that hardly anybody in this sport ever gets.
What comes next for Verlander and the Tigers
For Verlander, a five-year wait and then a ballot he will not need to campaign for. For Detroit, one more game with Pittsburgh on Sunday afternoon at Comerica, and a roster that just spent an afternoon watching what two decades of showing up actually looks like.
There is a footnote to all this that I like more than I should. The same Saturday, word came down that Max Scherzer, Verlander's rotation mate in Detroit for five seasons, is going to wait until the offseason to decide whether he wants a 20th big league year. Those two were throwing 98 in the same clubhouse fifteen years ago. One of them just took the ball out of his own hand. The other is still thinking about it.
That Tigers rotation is going to be a Cooperstown exhibit one day. I'm watching Sunday's finale, and then I'm watching to see what Scherzer decides.
