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Justin Verlander is retiring after the season
For those who were around to watch the rise of the 1984 World Series team, you saw the Detroit Tigers come together from the minors. Jack Morris, Alan Trammell, you know the names. When they came up from Triple-A Evansville or Double-A Montgomery, they were the future of a team that would be one of the most successful teams of the decade.
I was in my parents basement, surrounded by wood paneling when the Tigers won the World Series on Sunday, October 14, 1984. After that, I grew up in the painful 90's, where the Tigers could not develop a successor or a series of pitchers at all. I sat through the painful 1996 season that produced a team ERA of 6.38. I got excited for Justin Thompson and the hype surrounding him.
When Justin Verlander made the Tigers out of spring training in 2006, I was skeptical and, quite frankly, wary.
Even with Jim Leyland taking over after Alan Trammell was fired, I was cynical. I was close to being checked out on the Tigers altogether. I had watched Leyland’s short run with the Rockies end badly, and I wondered whether he could really turn around a team that had been buried near the bottom of the American League for years.
Verlander came with promise, but I had heard that before. The local papers had once talked up pitchers like Nate Cornejo and Adam Pettyjohn as arms of the future, and both came and went. At that time, minor league coverage was limited. You saw box scores in the paper, maybe read something in a magazine, and that was about it.
But Verlander felt different. He was striking out hitters at every level and overpowering lineups in a way that went beyond a win-loss record. Cornejo’s 16-3 season had been discussed constantly, but Verlander’s dominance carried a different weight.
He was the first Tigers pitcher I watched who had real swagger. He felt like Detroit’s version of Roger Clemens or Randy Johnson, the kind of pitcher who could take over a game and make everything feel different. Clemens and Johnson had dominated the Tigers so often, whether I watched them on TV or saw them in person, and now Detroit finally had an arm that looked capable of doing the same thing to someone else.
As the years went on, Verlander became something different. He went from a talented young arm to must-see television. He became JV.
There are only a handful of pitchers who make you stop what you are doing when they are on the mound, and Verlander became one of them. Every start carried the possibility of something memorable. The fastball could still climb late in games, the breaking ball could embarrass hitters, and when he had everything working, it felt like you were watching a pitcher from another era dropped into the middle of modern baseball.
The no-hitters only added to that feeling. As a fan, those moments were filled with pride. This was not some free-agent ace Detroit borrowed from another organization. This was the Tigers’ guy. Drafted, developed and unleashed in Detroit. After years of watching the organization search for answers, Verlander became the answer.
For people from my generation, especially those of us who graduated high school in 1999 and watched the Tigers stumble through some brutal baseball years, seeing Verlander dominate on the national stage was just f——ing cool. There is no cleaner way to say it. We had watched the Tigers lose 100 games. We had watched rebuilds go nowhere. We had watched prospects get hyped up and disappear. Then Verlander arrived and gave Detroit a pitcher who could stand next to anyone in the sport.
As I got deeper into writing about baseball, my appreciation for him only grew. It is one thing to watch dominance as a fan. It is another to understand how rare it is to sustain that level of performance, adjust through different stages of a career and remain relevant long after most power pitchers fade. Verlander did that. He went from the fiery ace who attacked hitters with visible intensity to the veteran who learned how to pitch with command, preparation and patience.
Now, near the end of his career, there is something meaningful about seeing him back in Detroit. He is no longer the same pitcher who could overpower an entire lineup on pure force, but he still carries the presence of someone who knows what greatness requires. If he can help the Tigers this season, even in a different role than the one he once owned, it would be another layer to a career already headed to Cooperstown.
His work ethic deserves every bit of respect it gets. So does the career. Verlander became a Hall of Fame pitcher, a franchise-changing arm and one of the defining players in modern Tigers history.
I got to watch my first homegrown Hall of Famer come through Detroit and help pull the franchise away from the sins of bad rebuilding. That is what made it special. He did not erase all of the bad years, but he changed what the Tigers could be. He gave them credibility, attitude and a standard.
For those of us who lived through the losing before him, watching Justin Verlander become Justin Verlander was more than great baseball.
It was proof that the Tigers could matter again.
Follow me on "X" @rogcastbaseball
Continue reading...
For those who were around to watch the rise of the 1984 World Series team, you saw the Detroit Tigers come together from the minors. Jack Morris, Alan Trammell, you know the names. When they came up from Triple-A Evansville or Double-A Montgomery, they were the future of a team that would be one of the most successful teams of the decade.
I was in my parents basement, surrounded by wood paneling when the Tigers won the World Series on Sunday, October 14, 1984. After that, I grew up in the painful 90's, where the Tigers could not develop a successor or a series of pitchers at all. I sat through the painful 1996 season that produced a team ERA of 6.38. I got excited for Justin Thompson and the hype surrounding him.
When Justin Verlander made the Tigers out of spring training in 2006, I was skeptical and, quite frankly, wary.
Even with Jim Leyland taking over after Alan Trammell was fired, I was cynical. I was close to being checked out on the Tigers altogether. I had watched Leyland’s short run with the Rockies end badly, and I wondered whether he could really turn around a team that had been buried near the bottom of the American League for years.
Verlander came with promise, but I had heard that before. The local papers had once talked up pitchers like Nate Cornejo and Adam Pettyjohn as arms of the future, and both came and went. At that time, minor league coverage was limited. You saw box scores in the paper, maybe read something in a magazine, and that was about it.
But Verlander felt different. He was striking out hitters at every level and overpowering lineups in a way that went beyond a win-loss record. Cornejo’s 16-3 season had been discussed constantly, but Verlander’s dominance carried a different weight.
He was the first Tigers pitcher I watched who had real swagger. He felt like Detroit’s version of Roger Clemens or Randy Johnson, the kind of pitcher who could take over a game and make everything feel different. Clemens and Johnson had dominated the Tigers so often, whether I watched them on TV or saw them in person, and now Detroit finally had an arm that looked capable of doing the same thing to someone else.
As the years went on, Verlander became something different. He went from a talented young arm to must-see television. He became JV.
There are only a handful of pitchers who make you stop what you are doing when they are on the mound, and Verlander became one of them. Every start carried the possibility of something memorable. The fastball could still climb late in games, the breaking ball could embarrass hitters, and when he had everything working, it felt like you were watching a pitcher from another era dropped into the middle of modern baseball.
The no-hitters only added to that feeling. As a fan, those moments were filled with pride. This was not some free-agent ace Detroit borrowed from another organization. This was the Tigers’ guy. Drafted, developed and unleashed in Detroit. After years of watching the organization search for answers, Verlander became the answer.
For people from my generation, especially those of us who graduated high school in 1999 and watched the Tigers stumble through some brutal baseball years, seeing Verlander dominate on the national stage was just f——ing cool. There is no cleaner way to say it. We had watched the Tigers lose 100 games. We had watched rebuilds go nowhere. We had watched prospects get hyped up and disappear. Then Verlander arrived and gave Detroit a pitcher who could stand next to anyone in the sport.
As I got deeper into writing about baseball, my appreciation for him only grew. It is one thing to watch dominance as a fan. It is another to understand how rare it is to sustain that level of performance, adjust through different stages of a career and remain relevant long after most power pitchers fade. Verlander did that. He went from the fiery ace who attacked hitters with visible intensity to the veteran who learned how to pitch with command, preparation and patience.
Now, near the end of his career, there is something meaningful about seeing him back in Detroit. He is no longer the same pitcher who could overpower an entire lineup on pure force, but he still carries the presence of someone who knows what greatness requires. If he can help the Tigers this season, even in a different role than the one he once owned, it would be another layer to a career already headed to Cooperstown.
His work ethic deserves every bit of respect it gets. So does the career. Verlander became a Hall of Fame pitcher, a franchise-changing arm and one of the defining players in modern Tigers history.
I got to watch my first homegrown Hall of Famer come through Detroit and help pull the franchise away from the sins of bad rebuilding. That is what made it special. He did not erase all of the bad years, but he changed what the Tigers could be. He gave them credibility, attitude and a standard.
For those of us who lived through the losing before him, watching Justin Verlander become Justin Verlander was more than great baseball.
It was proof that the Tigers could matter again.
Follow me on "X" @rogcastbaseball
Continue reading...
