JV? More like varsity
Verlander leads Astros with another 'superhuman' effort
Justin Verlander added to his Hall of Fame career with another stellar postseason start, holding down the powerful Yankees offense yet again.
HOUSTON — So close to such a startling accomplishment, the 2017 Yankees lived a lesson spread through the baseball world for a long time now:
Justin Verlander is harder to eliminate than his initials buddy Jason Voorhees of “Friday the 13th” fame.
Actually, defeating the Yankees in a do-or-die contest marked one of the few items remaining on Verlander’s bucket list … until Friday night.
The Astros found their savior in a man the Yankees know all too well, and now we get the third all-the-marbles duel of this thrilling pinstriped postseason on Saturday night. Because Verlander threw seven shutout innings, leading his team to a 7-1 victory over Joe Girardi’s group in Friday night’s American League Championship Series Game 6 at Minute Maid Park, we go to Game 7, with CC Sabathia facing Charlie Morton in what will be the Yankees’ fifth elimination game of the month.
The winning team will go straight to Los Angeles to face the Dodgers in the World Series. The loser will head home for the winter.
“I don’t think you prepare or think any differently,” Verlander said. “The best way for me to explain it is, multiple times throughout the game, I forget what inning we’re in, what’s going on around me. My only fo- cus is to execute pitch by pitch. I won’t even remember what batter is coming up.”
Both teams will remember this start if the Astros win it all Saturday. Verlander, 34, lost his first elimination game as a rookie with the Tigers, dropping 2006 World Series Game 5 to the Cardinals. Since then, he has pitched in four more and won each of them. He prevailed in 2011 ALCS Game 5 over the Rangers, 2012 AL Division Series Game 5 against the Athletics and 2013 ALDS Game 5 versus the A’s and their impressive rookie Sonny Gray.
Add to that Friday’s performance, Verlander’s first such outing since becoming an Astro, in which he gave up five hits, walked one and struck out eight. He has now thrown 24 consecutive scoreless innings in elimination play, and overall in elimination games, the right-hander owns a 1.21 ERA to go with his 4-1 record, having struck out 41. Against the Yankees, in six playoff starts, Verlander owns a 4-0 record and 2.33 ERA, with 41 strikeouts in 38 2/3 innings.
“He’s been everything that we could have hoped for and more,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said of Verlander, whom the Astros acquired from Detroit on August 31. “This guy prepares. He rises to the moment. He’s incredibly focused, locked in during games, and emptied his tank tonight.”
This might go down as his most memorable performance yet — whether we’re talking elimination games or October starts against the Yankees — when you factor in Verlander’s age, his brilliant Game 2 start just six days prior (when he threw 124 pitches for a complete-game victory) and the wave these Yankees rode from The Bronx to here, when they flipped the vibe of this series by winning three straight.
“He was really good again,” Joe Girardi said. “You know, the thing in the two starts we faced him, he hasn’t been behind in counts and he’s thrown a ton of strikes.”
Of Verlander’s 99 pitches, 70 went for strikes.
As the Astros scored three runs off Luis Severino in the fifth, Verlander, not as dominant as in his Game 2 start, worked his way through first-and-second, no-out jams in both the sixth and seventh. He won a 10pitch battle with Aaron Hicks in the sixth, his strikeout slider “probably the pitch of the game for me,” he said, and George Springer made a great, leaping catch against the wall on Todd Frazier’s blast in the seventh.
It’ll be all hands on deck for Game 7.
“Probably not Verlander,” Hinch said, “but he’s superhuman, so we’ll see how he shows up [Saturday].”
“It depends on how I feel,” said Verlander, whose Tigers ended the Yankees’ season in 2006, 2011 and 2012. The Yankees, of course, already know Verlander is superhuman. They require no more evidence on Saturday.