WHY JUST ONE WIN WOULD MEAN MORE TO VERLANDER
Astros ace is ready and willing to remove goose egg from his World Series record
Justin Verlander has won a Cy Young Award, an MVP, an ALCS MVP, an ERA title and five strikeout crowns.
He is also the first pitcher in baseball history to go 0-5 in the World Series.
Earlier this series, he pointed out that, in today’s game, pitcher wins aren’t considered that meaningful.
But, with a chance to lock down Houston’s second World Series title in three years on Tuesday night at Minute Maid Park, the 36-year-old made clear that he was kidding.
“I mean, yeah. I think wins matter,” Verlander said. “I think that was a little bit of a joke.”
The veteran right-hander, who won 21 games in the regular season with the Astros and struck out a ridiculous 300 batters, lost twice in the championship series with the Detroit Tigers in 2006 and once in 2012. He got his first World Series ring in 2017 with the Astros, but was 0-1, and failed to win a Game 6 that would have been the clincher.
But Verlander doesn’t have the same kind of spotty post-season record that has plagued other great pitchers of his generation like Clayton Kershaw and David Price. Over his 15-year career, he has a 3.33 ERA in the regular season. In the playoffs, it balloons all the way up to … 3.35.
Still, this season he is 1-3 in five post-season starts, with a 4.15 ERA. He has also struggled in the first inning in particular, giving up home runs in three of them.
Gerrit Cole, who won Game 5 with a dominant nine-strikeout performance, said he is highly confident in his ace teammate.
“He’s prepared. He’s ready for this moment,” Cole said. “We’ve been communicating back and forth throughout the whole series on how we were going to make an adjustment to what we were seeing and how we were going to attack.”
Verlander acknowledged that a win on Tuesday would make up for some of the struggles of the past. “That would obviously be a moment that would be — that I would cherish in my career if that were able to happen,” he said.
Lance Barksdale, the homeplate umpire on Sunday night in Game 5, made an excellent case for the introduction of robot umps with several baffling calls.
The most controversial of them came in the seventh inning, with Cole facing Victor Robles in a 4-1 game. Robles appeared to work a walk that would have put two men on base and bring the tying run to the plate, but Barksdale punched him out on a pitch that was high and outside, ending the inning. The Nationals’ dugout basically freaked out.
Washington manager Dave Martinez, though, practised some serious diplomacy in his post-game comments. “You know what, I will not ever sit here and criticize an umpire,” he said.
“I’ve known Lance for a very long time and he’s really good.
“And that’s all I’m going to say about it. I’m not going to sit here — I know there were some choice words, but that’s just in the heat of the moment.”
This was probably wise strategy, given that ripping the calls would have just earned Martinez a fine, and also the enmity of an umpire crew that will work the remaining games in the series.
Houston manager A.J. Hinch said, basically, stuff happens: “There’s so much emotion that goes on in these plays, and depending on which side you are on, you’re going to have that reaction of — I haven’t seen it on video.”
Hinch also noted that his dugout basically freaked out earlier in the same inning, when Ryan Zimmerman was awarded a walk on a pitch that was usually called a strike. “Whichever side you’re on, you’re going to sort of react that way,” he said.
More alarming was a moment in the sixth inning, when Nationals pitcher Tanner Rainey appeared to drop a curveball in for a third strike on Michael Brantley. Catcher Yan Gomes got up to head back to the dugout, as all catchers have done since the dawn of time, but Barksdale didn’t give him the call. In an exchange between the two caught on camera, the umpire told Gomes he didn’t call the strike because, essentially, Gomes was being presumptuous.
Bring in the robots, already.
Martinez said that while he’s still hopeful right-hander Max Scherzer will recover enough from nerve issues in his neck to pitch in a possible Game 7 on Wednesday night, the Nationals manager is not thinking about what he would do if he couldn’t go. “You know, right now my focus is on Game 6. We’ve got to treat that as Game 7 right now,” Martinez said. “There won’t be a Game 7 if we can’t get a Game 6.”
This checks out. But Martinez also said he isn’t ruling out that a cortisone shot that Scherzer received on Sunday will work some magic.
“My understanding is, it takes about 24 hours for this injection to really work. So we’re going to try to give it 24 hours. As we all know, Max, he’s probably going to try to push it a little bit. But we want him to just try to let this medication kick in a little bit and then see where we’re at.”
But first, Game 6.