Verlander still seeking first win in Series
HOUSTON — Justin Verlander was answering questions about his start for the Astros in Friday night’s World Series opener when the head of the opposition’s baseball staff took the unorthodox step of walking into the interview room to extend a hand.
“Where did you start your career again?” Phillies executive Dave Dombrowski said with a grin.
As Detroit’s general manager, Dombrowski made Verlander the No. 2 pick in the 2004 amateur draft.
“He’s still wearing the same cologne,” Verlander told his audience. “It’s a very distinct one. I remember that smell.”
Verlander has a nose for success, not just fragrance — it was Paul Sebastian, Dombrowski said later. The 39year-old right-hander likely is headed to his third Cy Young award in his first season back from Tommy John surgery, going 18-4 with a major league-best 1.75 ERA to give him a 244-133 record, a 3.24 ERA and 3,198 strikeouts in 17 seasons.
Yet he remains in search of his first World Series
win after going 0-6 with a 5.68 ERA in seven Series starts.
“This guy’s pitched well,” Verlander’s former manager in Detroit, Jim Leyland, said in a telephone interview. “These guys are human. They can have a bad game every now and then. And if it’s on a big stage, it gets magnified a little bit.”
Houston swept Seattle and the Yankees in the playoffs and could join the 1976 Cincinnati Reds (7-0) as the only teams to go through the postseason unbeaten since the division era started in 1969.
Aaron Nola starts for the Phillies, the first third-place team to reach a Series and a franchise that has brought just two titles to Philadelphia — compared to five won by the Athletics before leaving town after 1954.
Houston is in the Series for the fourth time in six seasons and second in a row under manager Dusty Baker after losing to Atlanta in six games last year. For a significant segment of fans, Houston’s 2017 champions are remembered as the Cheatin’ Astros, the fallout from the scandal in which Major League Baseball determined Houston used a video camera to signal opponent pitches to its batters.
Verlander is among five players on the Series roster left from the 2017 Astros, joined by second baseman Jose Altuve, third baseman Alex Bregman, first baseman Yuli Gurriel and pitcher Lance McCullers Jr.
“Dusty and I both would like to check off my first World Series win, his first World Series championship,” Verlander said. “There’s been games in the World Series that I don’t deserve a win. There’s been games that I thought I pitched well enough where we could get a win and it just didn’t work out. At this point in the season personal goals like that just don’t matter. Try to win the game however you can.”
Verlander will be starting his third Series opener. He lost to St. Louis as a rookie in 2006, giving up a two-run homer to Albert Pujols, and to San Francisco in 2012, allowing a pair of long balls to San Francisco’s Pablo Sandoval. In 2017, he lost Game 6 and married supermodel Kate Upton three days after Game 7.