By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/10/15/verlander-uses-a-new-mind-to-pitch-old-school/Justin Verlander’s career could end today, and Saturday’s the game they’ll remember him for for years to
come. The no-hitters of the past? The dominance he once had in Detroit and re-claimed down the stretch
for this year’s Astros? Sure, you’ll think of that. Hard not to.
But Game Two of this American League Championship Series is the one you’ll remember. When he went
out like his vintage self and struck out a lucky (for him) thirteen Yankees and surrendered one measly
fifth-inning run while pitching a five-hitter and giving the Astros bullpen the day off.
When he acted as his own closer against most logic and reason, pitched a masterpiece, and still had to
wait for someone, anyone, to bust a one-all tie in the bottom of the ninth. Mad dash home and a Yankee
catcher dropping the throw home to walk it off? Verlander isn’t complaining.
Apparently, there was no question in Astros manager A.J. Hinch’s mind. “No words were necessary,” said
Verlander after the game ended. “It was my game to win or lose.”
After all the hijinks, shenanigans, calamities, and catastrophes that seemed the themes of most division
series games, a pair of pitching duels between the Astros and the Yankees, both of which ended in 2-1
Astro wins, seemed like a peculiar return to normalcy. Which isn’t to say either team believes it can stay
this way the rest of this LCS.
But they can dream, can’t they?
In one way, Verlander does. Pitching complete in a postseason game throws back to fellows like Whitey
Ford, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, and Warren Spahn. To the days when pitchers threw three hundred
plus innings a season and nobody noticed whether their arms were liable to self-amputate while they
were at it.
One from that so-called golden age of baseball almost did: Robin Roberts. The National League’s work-
horse of the first half of the 1950s, his fastball went AWOL by 1958 and he had to re-invent himself as
a bit of a junkballer to survive almost another decade.
“I do often wonder how I would’ve been back then,” said Verlander, a pitcher who has a little bit of a
history of arm and shoulder trouble. “I think it would be a pretty cool time to play baseball.”
You’re not exactly sure his Astros teammates felt likewise. “When a guy like Verlander goes out there
and throws nine innings and 124 pitches,” said Carlos Correa, who hit one over the right field wall on
Yankee starter Luis Severino’s otherwise effective dollar, “you don’t want to play extra innings. You
want to win that game for him.”
Jose Altuve sure helped. The little big man who sometimes seems as though he’d like to be the Astros’
one-man demolition expert took notice that Game Two was tied one-all going to the bottom of the ninth
and probably knew it was the final shot the Astros had at rewarding Verlander with a W.
So he slashed the first pitch he saw from Yankee closer Aroldis Chapman up the pipe for a one-out single.
Then Correa ripped a full-count, just shy of a hundred miles an hour fastball into the right center field
gap. Yankee right fielder Aaron Judge, whose futility at this postseason’s plate has become a slightly
bothersome sub-story for the Yankees so far, cut off the ball and fired a perfect strike to his cutoff man,
shortstop Didi Gregorius.
With Astros third base coach Gary Pettis waving Altuve home without thinking even once, never mind
twice, Gregorius fired home. He had Altuve dead on the short hop. And Yankee catcher Gary Sanchez
dropped the ball. And Altuve slid across the plate with the winner.
But who needed him? Everyone wanted to talk about Verlander. And who could blame them? The last
man to strike out thirteen or better and go all the way in a postseason start was the Giants’ Tim
Lincecum in 2010. The last man to do it against the Yankees was Gibson in the 1964 World Series.
The only men to strike out more Yankees than Verlander in a postseason game were Koufax (15,
1963 World Series) and Carl Erskine (14, 1953 Series).
“If we hadn’t scored there,” said Astros center fielder George Springer, “I wouldn’t have been surprised
to see him come out for the tenth. That’s just him.”
That might have been pushing it just a tad. Verlander made his case for going out for the ninth as it
was when he struck out the side in the eighth. Correa and Altuve made sure nine and 124 were quite
enough, thank you. Even Verlander thinks so, sort of.
“With everything that is going on,” he said, “not just on the personal level but for the team, being in
the championship series and being in a 1-1 game the whole way and being able to go nine and, man,
just everything. It’s definitely one of the most satisfying starts I’ve had in my career.”
The only time Verlander saw any real trouble was the top of the fifth, when Aaron Hicks and Todd Frazier
doubled off him back-to-back. Microcosmically Verlander’s jewel can be rated thus: He took thirteen
Yankees to 0-2 counts and got rid of all of them, including striking seven of the thirteen out. He also
got nine of his thirteen punchouts on sliders, which he threw at the highest percentage of his career.
Last year, while still a Tiger, Verlander and manager Brad Ausmus had a chat the drift of which was that
Verlander going by instinct was beginning to kill him at long last. He began making a kind of dossier
on his own involving his pitch data, including spin rates and release points. Coming to the Astros this
season, Verlander walked into an organisation that was already as analytical as he was making himself
become.
He hasn’t lost as an Astro so far, and he’s impressed his teammates with his brains as much as his arm.
“Before a game, you come in here and he’s at a table with 25 pieces of paper spread out and all kinds of
other stuff,” said Carlos Beltran to
Sports Illustrated. “He is the most prepared pitcher I’ve ever been
around.”
The Astros like analytics? Verlander asks for more than even they have at hand. And assorted Astros are
only too happy to provide them.
“One of the things we’ve talked about,” Dallas Keuchel, who beat the Yankees in Game One with a gem
in his own right, and who’s become fast friends with Verlander over their common analytical approach,
told SI. “is having a plan pitch to pitch. Sometimes it may look like a guy is on you with a swing, but you
can’t give up on that pitch. If you don’t have to change, you don’t have to change.”
That’s not exactly the old school, of course. But when marry the new mind to pitch like the old school, it
can mean a 2-0 American League Championship Series for your team and a Game Two in which the only
thing Verlander didn’t do was throw something down a Yankee throat. And who’s to say he wouldn’t do
that the next time out?
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