Verlander keeps paying dividends for Astros

Two years and one week later -- and five days after Justin Verlander pitched the third no-hitter of his career and nearly a perfect game against the Blue Jays -- something does not change with Verlander: The trade that Astros made for him at the now defunct waiver Trade Deadline near midnight on Aug. 31, 2017, remains as big and important an in-season trade -- especially for a pitcher -- as baseball has ever seen.

And if the Astros go on to win another World Series this year, as they did two years ago after getting Verlander from the Tigers, the trade only gets bigger and more important.

Other great pitchers have been moved, of course, during seasons or after them. The Mets traded a young guy named Nolan Ryan to the Angels once for Jim Fregosi. Tom Seaver got traded during the 1977 season. Randy Johnson got traded and Curt Schilling got traded. So did Roger Clemens late in his career, to the Yankees. Josh Beckett, in his prime, got traded to the Red Sox and helped them win a World Series, 10 years before Verlander did the same for the Astros.

Do the Astros beat the Yankees in the American League Championship Series that year without Verlander, who was 5-0 in the regular season after the trade was made? Maybe. But that’s not the way to bet. And when the Astros were the same as being match point down in that ALCS -- down three games to two at Minute Maid Park -- Verlander pitched seven shutout innings and struck out eight and was as much of a star as he’d ever been in his baseball life.

Now he has pitched that third no-hitter and joined a club of pitchers who have pitched that many that includes Ryan and Sandy Koufax and Bob Feller and Cy Young. In the process Verlander -- who on Friday becomes the latest guy since Johnny Vander Meer to try to pitch two no-hitters in a row -- put a hammerlock on another Cy Young Award.

He also makes you appreciate, all over again, the truly historic nature of what happened that night two years ago, when the Astros acquired a future Hall of Famer and one of the star pitchers of his generation, one who then helped the Astros win the first World Series in their history.

“It’s elation,” Verlander said after striking out 14 Blue Jays last Sunday and coming as close as he did to that perfect game.

Imagine how Jeff Luhnow, the baseball boss of the Astros, and A.J. Hinch, their manager, felt when it was official that Verlander was joining their team. The Astros hadn’t just acquired a difference-maker in Verlander, someone who still has a chance to get to 300 victories the way he is pitching at 36, like some baseball version of Tom Brady. They had acquired someone who would make all the difference for them. And might do that again.

I asked Hinch, as good as there is in baseball at this time, the other day what the waiting was like that night, and the uncertainty of not knowing whether the trade was actually going to happen. The Astros had gone through all that losing. A wonderful team had been built around young talent like Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa and George Springer. But now they had this chance to swing for the fences with one of the true and enduring aces of this time in baseball, even though there were more than a few times that night when Luhnow and Al Avila, running the Tigers baseball operation, thought the deal had fallen apart.

“That was such a wide range of emotions that night,” Hinch said. “Jeff and I had talked multiple times. It was on, we got him. Then it was off, the trade fell through. Back on. Back off. It felt like three or four times. Then he called me a little before midnight and he said the deal blew up and he tried to motivate me that all was going to be fine and we tried. From my end, the deadline passed and I had texted my coaches that we weren’t going to do anything further. Then the text came back ... JV was on our team. It was incredible.”

So much history to that trade, and not just in Houston. If the Astros don’t get Verlander, maybe the Yankees beat Houston and win their 28th World Series and first since 2009. If the Astros don’t get Verlander, maybe the Dodgers win their first World Series since 1988.

But the Astros did get him. In the last moments of August.