Justin Verlander is going out on the mound, not on a curtain call.
The 43-year-old right-hander will make the 557th and final start of his major league career Saturday afternoon against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Comerica Park. He threw his last between-starts bullpen session Tuesday.
It will be his first start at Comerica Park as a Tiger since August 2017, which is nine years and one trade deadline ago.
He refused the ceremonial inning
This is the whole reason the story matters. Verlander has not pitched since the end of March because of left hip inflammation and, more recently, a left hamstring strain. He has had no rehab starts and limited ramp-up time. His arm is not stretched out.
The easy version of this is one batter, a standing ovation, and a wave from the dugout steps. Verlander told his manager no.
“I don’t just want to go out there and do one inning and come out and wave,” Verlander said. “I would like to toe the rubber one more time in a competitive way and try to win the Detroit Tigers a ballgame.”
A.J. Hinch confirmed it.
“He’s made it perfectly clear to me that he doesn’t want the one-inning sendoff,” the Tigers manager said.
This was not supposed to be the last year
Verlander signed with Detroit as a free agent in February, coming home for what he hoped would be one more full season. He has said since his rookie year that he wanted to pitch until 45, following Nolan Ryan’s blueprint.
“I honestly didn’t envision this being the last season, but that’s the way things go,” he said.
He also admitted he could have walked away a month or two ago and chose not to, saying he “pushed as hard as I possibly could, skipping a lot of steps, risking some serious injury potentially.”
Twenty-one years
That is the number worth sitting with. Verlander debuted in a completely different era of baseball, survived Tommy John surgery in his late thirties, and pitched at an elite level in three separate decades.
The career spanned a Tigers dynasty that never quite won, a Houston run that did, and a late-career reinvention that most power pitchers never manage.
Detroit is doing this right
The Tigers are building a celebration around the start, complete with a hooded jersey giveaway. The crowd will be enormous and loud and probably weepy by the third inning.
What makes it work is that the man being honored insisted on earning the moment. A forty-three-year-old with an unstretched arm going out to face a major league lineup because a wave from the mound felt like cheating is exactly the competitiveness that defined the career.
He may not get through three innings. He will absolutely try.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.