Verlander ready to soar with contending Astros
Justin Verlander does not recall the exact moment his phone rang Thursday night as he walked back from dinner. He only knows he didn’t have time to waste.
“Eleven- twenty something,” he recounted Sunday morning from Houston, where he sat between his new bosses, Astros manager A. J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow.
Trade talks between the Detroit Tigers and Astros that spanned most of the summer finally concluded a little more than a half- hour before Thursday’s 11: 59 p. m. ET trade deadline, leaving Verlander with precious moments to make the biggest decision of his professional career: waive his no- trade clause to join the contending Astros, leaving behind more than a decade of decorated work in Detroit.
So he paced his living room with his fiancée, model and Michigan native Kate Upton. “It’s hard to put into words the emotions going on — from uprooting my family to everything you can imagine,” Verlander said. “Someone says, ‘ You have 35, 40 minutes to decide.’ You know nothing about it. Go!” And go he did. In waiving his no- trade rights and going to Houston — where he’ll spend not just the remainder of 2017 but also the 2018 and 2019 seasons — Verlander said he tried to simplify the process, despite the narrow time window to decide.
“Trust your instincts. Ultimately, it came down to winning. You’re set up with an organization to win for a long time.”
And Verlander’s yes verdict marked a huge win for the Astros organization.
Verlander surprised his teammates Saturday by popping into the dugout during their doubleheader sweep of the New York Mets. He described it as a surreal experience — meeting “his new friends,” as he called them, as “the new kid at school.”
But his new baseball relationship has him in first place, on a club that has the best record in the American League despite an August swoon, in a city reeling from the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
Verlander knows the landscape, knows he’s joining a team with a strong everyday core and All- Star pitchers such as Dallas Keuchel and Lance McCullers, and deferentially called himself “a puzzle piece” Sunday. But he also knows the Astros didn’t bring his 95- mph fastball, his 183 career wins and the specter of him throwing a shutdown game in a playoff setting here to shirk the spotlight.
The franchise that’s never won a World Series and the ace who’s pitched in two Fall Classics but never prevailed now have a common cause.