Detroit — He’s not going to quit. It doesn’t matter that he’s 43, that he’s won every major award available and is ticketed for Cooperstown. As he stood before the media Friday, announcing that he sustained another injury and would not be making his return to Comerica Park Sunday as planned, Justin Verlander vowed to keep trying to get back this season.
“You guys have known me long enough,” he said. “There’s no giving up. This is half-way through a season that I committed to the Detroit Tigers. Nobody envisioned it going this way. But I also intend on giving it my everything until the season is over.”
Verlander, out since April 1 with inflammation in his left hip, announced in a press conference Wednesday in Houston that he was ready to go. He was supposed to make his first start as a Tiger at Comerica Park on Sunday.
After the press conference, he went into the bullpen at Daikin Park and felt something tighten in his left hamstring.
“I cut my bullpen short,” he said. “Anytime I’m not able to get my work in, it means something is definitely off. I decided to get it looked at and obviously something is going on there, a strain. It’s really unfortunate. It just sucks. I don’t know what else to say.”
It’s possible the hamstring had been an issue during the last couple of weeks. Verlander had complained that he hadn’t been able to quite get his mechanics right. His delivery would be fluid, his velocity good but he was having difficulty repeating it.
“Maybe this was something that underlying, that was holding me back,” he said. “That would be a real optimistic view. Maybe it was just really tight and hanging on by a thread. I don’t know. Walking around yesterday and today, it feels pretty free and easy.
“I mean, glass half-full, I get back to throwing and this heals up and it’s, ‘Oh wow, that was something that was lingering and now I’m better than I was before.’ But that still doesn’t take the sting away from being tantalizingly close to finally being back on the mound here at home.”
The other view, of course, is that Father Time is trying to stay undefeated.
“As a professional athlete, 43 years old, you just take things as they come,” Verlander said. “It does no good to sit here and dwell on it or be woe is me. You just have to deal with it like everything else. Things don’t always go the way you envision them. This certainly didn’t.
“Now I deal with it and hopefully this is it. Get this under my belt, move past it and it’s easy sailing to the end of the season. That would be fantastic.”
Verlander is the game’s active leader in wins and strikeouts. He’s got an MVP, three Cy Young awards, two World Series rings and three no-hitters. Whatever happens in the next few months isn’t going to define his career.
It’s just not the way he wants it to end.
“It’s definitely a different conversation now than it was last year when I seemed to be really healthy,” he said. “There are a lot of thoughts I’m going to have to take into consideration. My family is up here now. My son turned one today. My daughter is seven. I just went to a play of hers. There’s lots of things going on that are a draw away from the game.
“I’ve always said I want to play until the wheels fall off. I don’t know, maybe they are falling off.”
He laughed when he said that, though he knows how it sounded.
“I hope not,” he said. “But one thing I’ve been in my career is pretty objective when analyzing myself. That’s served me really well. I’m honest with myself…I critique myself harder than anybody. I’ve handled this no differently. If I can’t be healthy and I continue to prove I can’t be healthy, then that’s something I really need to evaluate.”
He’s not there yet. He’s going to shut it down for a while to rehab the hamstring and then restart his throwing program, just about from square one.
“It’s not going to be a matter of days but weeks,” manager AJ Hinch said.
He was out two and a half months with the hip. There are three and a half months left in the season.
“This is uncharted territory for me and it sucks,” Verlander said. “But first and foremost, right now it’s head down, work hard, get past this and try to get back out there for the Detroit Tigers and for myself.”
Keider Montero will start on Sunday in the finale against the White Sox and remain in the rotation.
Chris.McCosky@detroitnews.com
@cmccosky
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Tigers’ Justin Verlander scratched from Sunday start
Reporting by Chris McCosky, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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By Chris McCosky, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
