We May Never See Another Justin Verlander
The MLB offseason is always rife with excitement. Speculation on free agents, predictions for breakout players, and teams either frantically signing and trading players, or sitting on their hands while their fans shout at them on social media. The hot stove this winter is admittedly pretty cold. There aren’t a whole lot of premier free agents, and most clubs have no idea how to approach the revenue limitations. It’s not exactly a buyers market. So, instead of debating where young talent is going to sign, I’m going to focus on some older talent, specifically Justin Verlander.
Verlander is not going to be making any headlines this offseason, unless it’s a recovery timeline. In September, the Astros announced that he would undergo season ending UCL surgery after a setback in a simulated game (1). Chances are he won’t see the mound at all in 2021. While Tommy John surgery used to be a death sentence for a pitcher’s career, in the last decade most players make full recoveries, and many of them return better than they were before. At the tail end of his career though, one could assume Verlander’s reconstructive elbow surgery doesn’t automatically mean he’ll bounce back better than ever.
I’m not here to speculate on the future of Verlander in the MLB, I truly hope he can return to full form and give the fans another few years of pure dominance on the mound. What should be acknowledged, however, is the often overlooked fact that Verlander is one of the most talented pitchers to ever play the game of baseball. Regardless of his return, he should be remembered as such.
Saying that Justin Verlander is a great pitcher, or even a Hall of Famer, isn’t exactly a hot take. Everyone knows this. He’s an 8x All-Star, 2x Cy Young winner with plenty of other top 5 finishes, and he’s one of only 11 pitchers in the Cy Young era to be crowned MVP. That alone proves he’s a generational player. There’s no need to even mention his membership to the ultra-exclusive 3,000 strikeout club, but of course I’m going to. The hardware speaks for itself.
Aside from Verlander’s strikeout prowess and shiny trophies, his career stats leave a little bit to be desired to those who measure a player’s dominance by sheer numbers. Briefly, let’s compare him to two other pitchers who are often considered the best of this generation: Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer.
Kershaw is in a different stratosphere than most pitchers from a purely numbers perspective. Through 13 seasons, he’s the active ERA leader for all pitchers with a career 2.43 earned run average. Scherzer is a tad higher with a 3.21 ERA through 13 seasons, and Verlander comes just shy of that with a 3.33 career ERA.
This same hierarchy of statistical dominance follows most other major categories. Kershaw leads all active players in ERA+, WHIP, and a mass of other advanced sabermetrics, and Scherzer usually sits somewhere between him and Verlander. While he doesn’t measure up to these two statistical demigods, Verlander’s career stats are nothing to scoff at.
Relying on statistics like these are generally very good indicators of just how good a player is. However (statisticians, shield your eyes!), there is no stat in baseball for jaw dropping dominance in a game. Maybe it’s cliche, but you just have to witness Verlander’s absurd ability to mow hitters down to understand his greatness. In the prime of his career, Verlander’s fastball velocity was a statistical anomaly. His average fastball velocity wasn’t the outlier though; he had an uncanny ability to throw harder the deeper he went into a game.
A video from the Youtube channel Foolish Baseball (I highly recommend their content to fans who love the weird bits of baseball) breaks down an inning of 2012 Verlander:
In summation, Verlander essentially breaks the laws of physics and throws a series of 100+ mph pitches in the eighth inning of a game, with spin rates that literally do not register on conventional charts. Expanding on the absurd stats mentioned in the video, there is a short list of starting pitchers who throw 99+ mph late in games. Verlander has 114 such pitches in the 8th inning or later since 2008. Let’s call these pitches Verlanders. James Paxton has the second highest total, with a comparatively measly 20 Verlanders, and only two pitches from Max Scherzer registered as Verlanders. You know who’s not on this list? Clayton Kershaw.
Impressive as this is, many of the players who share Verlander’s other-worldly talent to throw gas late in games are still fairly young. In theory they have plenty of time to catch up to him. But baseball is trending in a direction that will make this incredibly difficult. Over the past ten seasons, the average innings pitched for a starter has steadily declined. In the 2010 season, starters averaged 6.0 innings per game, but that has dropped to just 5.2 innings in the 2019 season. Stats from the shortened 2020 season are certainly outliers, but it’s worth mentioning that the average innings for starters this year was just 4.8 per game.
Ace pitchers are not stretched as far as they used to be. Bullpen days are taking spots in rotations, season pitch limits for young stars limit their appearances, and teams like the Tampa Bay Rays are increasingly willing to turn games over to the bullpen early. We’ve likely seen the last of Verlander’s late inning firepower. He may also be the last to ever do it.
With Justin Verlander’s UCL staring down the barrel of an 18 month recovery, we probably won’t see him until the 2022 season, at which point he’ll be 39. Who knows, maybe some reconfiguration will put his arm in a time machine back to 2012 and we’ll see 8th inning triple digits on the radar gun once more. If anyone can do it, it’s Justin Verlander.
