Lakeland, Fla. — You hear players, even the most accomplished players, say it all the time: They are not a finished product and won’t be a finished product until the day they stop playing.
Justin Verlander is a living embodiment of that truth.
At age 43, with his Hall-of-Fame résumé all but complete, he is still evolving as a pitcher.
“You have to,” Verlander said Tuesday morning before heading out to throw a bullpen on the backfields at Joker Marchant Stadium. “Look, I’m not as dynamic as I once was. And these guys are really good as hitters. Last year, I was hard on myself. I could get to two strikes. I could get myself there.
“But it was hard to put guys away.”
This is the game’s active strikeout leader (3,553) talking. But this is also the guy who saw the put-away rate on his slider gradually drop from 27% in 2019 to 19% last year. It’s a guy who, as recently as 2022, carried an average velocity of 95 mph on his four-seamer, who sat at 93 mph for most of last season.
“The margins are smaller,” he said. “And as the hitters get better, the margins get so razor thin, I had to be so frickin’ dialed to get the results I wanted. It really stuck out to me just how hard it was to put guys away, and I had to adjust.”
He adjusted. He’s always adjusted. He’s always evolving. That’s how you not only survive for 20-plus seasons, it’s how you thrive.
On Aug. 21 last season, Verlander’s ERA was pushing 5.00 and the Giants had lost his last five starts. But in the seven starts from that point, he allowed just nine earned runs in 41⅓ innings (1.96 ERA), limited hitters to a .206 batting average with 38 strikeouts and 15 walks.
But, as he said, evolution never stops.
He’s coming into a new season, back in Detroit after an eight-year absence during which he won two more Cy Young awards and two World Series rings. He’s another year older, another 152 innings under his belt, another year removed from a neck injury that cost him most of the 2024 season.
Another year of testing and tweaking and adjusting and readjusting, a process which starts in earnest on Friday when he takes the mound at Joker Marchant Stadium for the first time since 2017.
“I’m excited to get off the mound in a game,” he said. “I think I can use the adrenaline. Also facing your hitters (in live bullpens), it’s a little different. Like I haven’t gone inside on right-handed hitters. You don’t want to hurt anybody in spring training. I do feel on the backfields you can get a lot out of it. … But you need to turn on the compete button.”
Verlander has thrown two live sessions this spring and the last, against lefty Zach McKinstry and righty Matt Vierling, was quite informative for him. Especially his at-bats against McKinstry who consistently was able to see and lay off Verlander’s slider.
“Yeah, the slider,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s been an issue for the last couple of years. It was one of the best pitches in baseball a few years back. Now it’s kind of slowly gone down.”
In 2019, Verlander had a ridiculous plus-31 run value on his slider, per Statcast. He limited hitters to a .119 batting average with a 39.9% whiff rate and a 41.1% strikeout rate. Last year, he struggled with the pitch for a long stretch, finally getting the feel for it back in September when he limited hitters to a .184 average (7-for-38) with a 30% whiff rate.
“I don’t know if it’s because my (arm) slot has gone up,” he said. “It’s been harder and harder for me to get the consistent poor swing decisions from the hitters with it. It’s something I have to work really, really hard on. Harder than I’d like to.”
It is a bit comforting that he regained his mastery of the slider late season. He expects to lock it back in sooner this year. Not that he is taking that for granted.
“Every year is different,” he said. “The ball changes a little bit every year.”
Verlander throws a tight slider, a gyro slider, as it’s called. In 2019, he was getting over 2,600 rpms of spin on it. Last year, he didn’t get to 2,500 rpm until later in the season.
“It’s not going to fool you with the movement,” he said. “That’s not the point of the pitch. The pitch fools you because you think it’s a fastball. And anything I do to deviate from that, they’re picking up on it, and it makes it hard for me to get outs with it.”
That’s why the McKinstry at-bats were so important for Verlander to see, though he gave himself a little grace on that.
“Zach is one of the best in baseball in not swinging at spin,” Verlander said. “He recognizes spin really well. That’s something else I need to take into account. Some hitters are naturally better at some things than others.”
With the slider inconsistency last year, Verlander finally broke down and added a sweeper to his mix.
“I finally joined the young guns,” he said, laughing. “I stayed away from throwing it for so long. But I was just scratching and clawing for anything I could be successful with last year.”
He avoided it for two reasons: When he was right, he didn’t need it. But also, he didn’t want to throw it if it altered his arm slot or mechanics.
“It was like, OK, we looked at all the ball mechanics on how I spun my curveball,” Verlander said. “Can I make a sweeper out of how I throw my curveball. Because I don’t want to change my arm or wrist. And we found a way to do it just using the seams on the ball. I can throw it very similar to how I throw my curveball, and that makes me more comfortable using it.”
He threw it about 8% of the time last year, and hitters were 3-for-57 against it with 19 strikeouts. His 20% put-away rate was the best out of any of his pitches.
“The results were really good,” he said. “I will probably use it more this year.”
The slider, the sweeper, the curveball, the changeup, Verlander has a full bag of options to throw at hitters. But in his heart, he’s still a power pitcher, whether he’s bringing it 94 mph or 99 to 100 like back in the day.
“Four-seamers up (in the zone) and sliders,” he said. “Seven years ago, those were kryptonite to hitters. They had adjusted their swings to try to launch the ball more, using one-plane swings, and their contact numbers went way down. Then the league adapted.
“As pitchers started doing that more, the hitters got really good at hitting the elevated heater. I was like, ‘Damn, I’ve been doing that for 15 years now. I’d rather you guys not get good at that.’ I had to learn how to combat that.
“I can’t throw a sinker. The way I throw a baseball, it’s really hard to move a hard pitch in (on right-handed hitters). I have to be a four-seam guy and so it becomes more about pitch mix and shape.”
And, he will tell you, the harder the four-seamer, the wider his margin for error. So, while he’s spent a lot of backfield time refining his slider, he’s also wondering when his velocity will start ticking up.
That’s a process unto itself.
“I’ve been someone who freaks out about velo since 2008,” Verlander said. “I always want to push it up.”
But he’s also been the guy, even in his younger days when 100 mph was coming out of his hand regularly, who built his velocity step by step throughout the spring and throughout a season. If he hit 96 or 97 mph in spring, then he knew he was where he needed to be going into the season.
This is a lot of years and a lot of innings later, but he was hitting 91 to 93 mph in his last live session.
“I would like to see a tick or two more,” he said. “I want to see it tick up in the game. But I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I hope it will with the adrenaline. But if it doesn’t, then, well, I’ve been here before. If adrenaline isn’t what I need, then it’s more reps. It’s getting the body moving.”
Last offseason, Verlander threw off the mound a lot because he was revamping his mechanics. This past offseason, he went back to just throwing long toss on flat ground for most of the winter.
“So now, the first time I threw off a mound felt really foreign because I had been throwing off flat ground,” he said. “It’s like a new stimulus that your body has to get used to. And you also have to get used to trying to throw hard. Once you get used to it, you are able to do a little bit more and a little bit more.
“That’s why you see a lot of guys with their velo down in the spring and then start to work their way up. That’s the body getting used to it. That being said, not trying to stress, but I’d like to see it get going more than it is.”
By the end of the season last year, Verlander was popping his fastball at 97 and 98 mph. He knows it’s still in him. He also knows that he pitched some of his best games last year when the velocity was down in the 93-95 mph range.
“When I got good after some of the adjustments I made, it brought my velo down,” he said. “But my pitches were significantly better. And it was because there was more deception. I will trade away some velo for some deception.”
This is what sustained excellence looks like. It’s a relentless pursuit. It’s a willingness to adapt. It’s not stubbornly fighting Father Time. It’s accepting the natural attrition and limitations of aging and being willing to devise and accept new strategies for success.
It’s steadfastly refusing to stay stuck on any past version of yourself and being ever curious about ways to navigate the here and now.
That is who Justin Verlander is now. Different than the brash youngster who bullied hitters with high-velocity fastballs. But impressive, still.
chris.mccosky@detroitnews.com
@cmccosky
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander’s relentless pursuit of greatness unabated by time
Reporting by Chris McCosky, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
