Verlander is 43, back with the Tigers on a one-year deal that brought his career full circle, and he's calling it quits after this season. MLB tapped him as a Legend Pick for his 10th All-Star Game, and by every account he treated it less like a farewell tour and more like one last chance to pass something down.
Verlander's speech inspires younger AL teammates before his final All-Star Game t.co/3jlQ0utppH
Think about the gap here. Verlander was winning Rookie of the Year, a Cy Young and an MVP while some of these AL All-Stars were still in grade school. So when he stood up in front of guys like Bobby Witt Jr. and told them not to take it for granted, that it's about meeting people and building relationships across the league, it landed differently coming from someone with 266 career wins and 21 years in the league. Dylan Cease, who got the ball to start the game, reportedly walked away joking Verlander could run for office someday given how he commands a room.
That same thoughtfulness showed up when he faced reporters. Rob Friedman, who's spent years chronicling pitching mechanics and grips for his PitchingNinja account, came away impressed that Verlander gave detailed, unscripted answers to everyone in line rather than the usual All-Star Game media-day autopilot.
The way JV answeed everyone’s questions was extremely detailed and thoughtful. An absolute pro. No canned answers. I actually enjoyed standing in line just listening. (That’s almost never the case with me because I have the attention span of a 3 year old.)
One of those answers cut right to the core of how the sport has changed under him. Verlander told Friedman the biggest shift since he broke in back in 2005 is analytics — useful in a lot of ways, but dangerous when analysts start grading a pitch purely off the data instead of watching how actual hitters react to it in games. That's a 21-year vet's version of a warning label, delivered from a guy who's thrown in the era of radar guns, spin rate and now stuff-plus models.
Justin Verlander on the biggest change in pitching since 2005: Analytics changed everything. Some of it's great. But JV says the danger now is analysts deciding whether a pitch is good based on the data, instead of how hitters actually react to it in games.
Friedman didn't stop at quotes. A day later he dropped a full visual retrospective of Verlander's pitch grips, tracing the arsenal from his Tigers days through Houston, Queens and now back in Detroit. For a guy who's thrown a four-seamer that's aged about as gracefully as anyone's in modern history, seeing the grips laid out side by side is basically a career X-ray.
Justin Verlander’s Pitch Grips. 👀 A Trip Through JV's Career, One Grip at a Time.
Verlander finishes this run with a career record of 266-159, a 3.33 ERA, 3 Cy Youngs, 2 World Series rings and a 2011 AL MVP to his name — numbers that already had him ticketed for Cooperstown before this week. What made this All-Star Game stand out wasn't a stat line, though. It was watching the sport's most decorated active arm spend his last go-round making sure the next generation actually listened.