After losing interest for a while, for some reason I decided to follow baseball — specifically the Detroit Tigers, my home team — again about a decade ago. (“some reason” = Kat got interested!) I re-entered fandom in the Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander era, and both gave us reason to cheer, leaving aside Verlander’s time with “those cheatin’ Astros,” as Kat puts it.
JV had ups and downs like any professional, but he’s a first ballot Hall of Famer, so it was mostly ups. One of my favorite sports memories ever came not because of one of his major triumphs, though, but because of a near miss.
It was August 2015, and the 10+ year veteran Verlander had been fighting off injuries, had spent time with the AAA Mud Hens, and though he was once again in the starting rotation he still seemed to be struggling.
The game didn’t mean much to either team, as I recall. (That was the Angels’ last season over .500, but they still weren’t contenders. How a team with Mike Trout and later Trout plus Shohei Ohtani can be so consistently weak is a case study in (bad) management school.) Anyway, that year we were even worse, so this was a night out at the park with very low stakes. And it felt that way as the Tigers scored a run, then a few more, and play just slogged on.
JV looked good, though, and as the innings piled up the fans noticed that he was really good, and our excitement mounted. But Kat, still new to watching, was baffled by the crowd’s reactions as the game went on. As we hit the top of the seventh inning she said “This is boring. And why’s everybody cheering every single out? And whispering to each other between batters?”
Being reasonably well-versed in superstitions, I didn’t want to say too much, but as I remember it (I probably don’t have an accurate mental picture anymore, but indulge me!) I pointed to the scoreboard and told her to look at the numbers for the Angels.
“All zeroes except for a 1 under the E.”
“Right, they made a fielding error. The rest, though. Like you said, ALL zeroes, all the way across, including a zero under the “H” column. And that means…?”
She’s not a numbers person, so there was a pause. But she’s also smart, so the pause was brief.
“Oh!”
No talk of leaving early now!
And the rest of the late innings went by and he’s striking out batters at an even faster clip, including five in a row in the 6th and 7th.
And then it was the ninth inning, everybody is on their feet, and a guy who will remain nameless here batting below .200 is up and Verlander works the count to 2-2 and then, according to Verlander, “I threw what I wanted. I just didn’t locate it. It was the only ball all night that I threw over the heart of the plate.” Even a so-so major leaguer facing an all-time great knows what to do in that situation, and the result was a hard line drive to left arcing and arcing and arcing and JV using all the body language he had to push it foul and…
…we all see a poof of chalk as it smacks the line. Fair ball. And JV does a deep backbend, looks to the sky, shakes his head and smiles wryly and then retires the side. So close, so much fun to watch. And his reaction: “In the past, obviously — not that it was ever easy — I hadn’t been through a tough time in my career yet. This has a special meaning because of the way the fans were treating me and reacting. I know they’ve wanted to see me back as bad as I have, and from the sixth inning on, they were unbelievable. They gave me goosebumps coming off the mound in the seventh because of the way they were reacting. It was nice to hear.”
Fast forward more than eleven years, to the second to last game of another bad season. Kat put together an outing to the park with friends for Saturday, September 26th, and a few days after she bought tickets the Tigers announced that this would be the second day of a Verlander celebration, since JV had decided he was retiring. He’d been injured for most of the year, and that wasn’t the only disappointment for him, and Tigers fans, since the team had plenty of truly bad luck injury-wise and didn’t do themselves any favors with their play on the field.
And then he was announced as starter for Saturday’s game, and this season looked like it might, temporarily, redeem itself for the lucky fans who already had tickets. Like us. (The game sold out quickly after that announcement.)
Long story short, he pitched 6 1/3 innings, struck out six, and looked like the pitcher we remembered from more than a decade before. A lot more gray in his beard, sure, but in command.
(My hypothesis — not a theory, since I’m even less qualified to manage a baseball team than whoever runs the Angels — is that once his recovery was underway, A.J. Hinch’s plan was that if the Tigers were doing well, he’d save JV for September and October, using him either as a starter or a closer or both. Keeping him off the mound until then would mean he’d be fresh and tired hitters wouldn’t have seen his stuff for a long while, so he’d be doubly effective in a run for the division title or in the playoffs. Alas, we weren’t even close to contention, so my guess is their thinking shifted towards not risking lifelong pain and mobility problems post-MLB…but also, that JV would pitch as hard as could for one last game until the point of risking permanent damage.)
The second backbend we’ll never forget happened when it finally came time for a pitching change. At that point Hinch came out, as he’d done many times before, to take the ball from his starter. But he didn’t walk straight to the mound, instead walking towards Tigers catcher Dillon Dingler, then gesturing off field…and JV’s daughter Genevieve ran out to remove her dad from the game.
Only then did Verlander lose his famous control, and when his daughter reached him he crumpled forward, over her, the opposite of what we’d seen a decade ago.
Apparently she’d never seen him cry so hard, so he spent much of their long hug reassuring her that he was happy, not sad.
And that was it. The rest of his family came out, he hugged them and his on-field teammates too, looked truly overcome as he walked off, we cheered, and the Tigers won the game with a walk-off homer by rookie Eduardo Valencia, who was five years old when JV pitched his first major league game.
My favorite quote this time?
“All the ovations today brought back a lot of fond memories of the old days here, when this park was raucous every night.
“My body, though, didn’t remind me of those days at all.”
Amen, and thank you.
