The new normal
Adjustments have Verlander in fine form
Justin Verlander’s vision extends beyond the present. He is among a handful of baseball’s best pitchers, a man who fools Father Time by only improving with age.
In two full seasons with the Astros, he has won a Cy Young Award and been runner-up for another. Last season, at age 36, he struck out 300 batters and accumulated the third-lowest WHIP in modern baseball history.
Still, Verlander watched his fastball velocity dip and felt his pitching mechanics gradually change. Most would ascribe it to
aging. Others could accept such a fate if such terrific results continued to follow.
Verlander bucks such convention. He is a man on a mission to pitch into his mid-40s. In a sport where so much is fleeting, losing sight of such longevity can be simple. Verlander refuses. The attitude guided a total mechanical overhaul during baseball’s shutdown as he eschewed some of what has guided him to Astros glory.
“If I was going to say, ‘Hey, I only want to play two more years,’ I could probably stay healthy and do that,” Verlander said. “That’s not my goal.”
Verlander called it a “full rebuild process.” It began four months and four days after he claimed the American League Cy Young Award. A revelation appeared for the Astros’ 37year-old ace inside a Philadelphia hospital. On the morning of March 17, Dr. William Meyers repaired a groin muscle Verlander nearly tore off the bone.
Images of Verlander’s leg before the surgery led Meyers to deliver a sobering truth. The physician told the pitcher his groin had “been unhealthy for a while.”
Verlander acknowledged there was some discomfort for a few seasons, but nothing serious enough for him to miss a start. Even the event that prompted his surgery didn’t bring pain. Verlander felt a “pop” in the adductor muscle while rehabilitating his spring training lat injury. Experience with a prior, pain-free core injury prompted him to visit Meyers.
“That’s where the light bulb went off after I had surgery and Dr. Meyer said the tissue had been really beat up and it had been so for a little bit,” Verlander said. “That’s just one of those things that the body subconsciously adjusts for. It wouldn’t allow me to do what I used to because (my groin) probably would have pulled or torn completely. Your body just subconsciously knows that stuff and won’t allow you to do it and, thus, why my mechanics had started to change.”
Pitchers with groin problems are often “jumpy” and become disconnected from their delivery too early. Verlander pored over his Astros footage and found both problems. Screenshots of his 2019 season showed he was “extremely high and vertical and arched” when delivering the baseball. Verlander once released his pitches at a height of 6 feet, 5 inches. Last year, there were instances when he released from 7 feet, 2 inches.
“I can’t have mechanics that put too much strain on my body in certain positions and last as long as I would like to last,” Verlander said. “That’s just kind of where it started. … It started with not being so arched and upright.”
Fixing one problem only created another. Verlander likened the process to plugging a roof in a rainstorm. One hole is patched, but then water spews through another. The rebuild took three months, all against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic.
Verlander said his surgery rehabilitation was considered essential, affording him access to facilities even when most of the country was ordered to stay home. The surgery stopped his throwing for around seven weeks. He resumed throwing daily in late April, diving into his mechanics.
“I changed a lot of stuff that some people would think was unnecessary. But I thought it was necessary, especially if I want to play eight or 10 more years,” Verlander said. “I don’t think last year’s mechanics, even though they were very effective, were sustainable health-wise over a long period of time.”
Verlander long has maintained he will pitch until he is 45. The Astros control him through his age-38 season.
Whether this one even happens is still unknown. Verlander said Thursday he’s “not yet” confident Major League Baseball can complete its 60-game season.
Chaos with the league’s COVID-19 testing and results leave him wary, but Verlander seemed sympathetic to the undertaking.
“I don’t think anybody thought this would go perfectly,” he said, before reinforcing the need for more rapid test results.
“I think they did a good job thinking through all this stuff. Now we just have to implement it,” Verlander said. “The first hurdle we’ve come to is testing and, in my opinion, the most important besides what we do ourselves. We have to figure it out quickly.”
Verlander must assume they will. On Thursday, in the Astros’ first intrasquad game of summer camp workouts, he threw three terrific innings to debut his new mechanics. He required 40 pitches to ravage the Astros’ presumed everyday lineup.
The only baserunner against Verlander reached on an error. He struck out five and did not allow a batted ball to leave the infield. Alex Bregman and Carlos Correa each struck out in one at-bat against him. Verlander bookended his brilliance with two strikeouts of George Springer, who looked at three pitches to start the outing and swung and missed to end it.
“I think today was a very pleasing day, a culmination of a lot of hard work over the past few months to get here,” Verlander said. “It’s not perfect yet, but today was everything I could have asked for.”