PHOENIX -- Justin Verlander remains all business on his way into the park, headphones on, mind focused. It’s one of the signature looks of his incredible career, and it’s a snapshot of the thought and concentration he puts into his work.
“Today we stay out of his way a little bit more,” manager A.J. Hinch said beforehand, “just given the headphones and the focus.”
The look on the mound in the outing that followed Monday night at Chase Field was anything but vintage. Verlander whirled his body around and craned his neck to follow the path of Corbin Carroll’s three-run home run, then looked at the ground and shook his head. His slider, the one secondary pitch he seemed to be executing in the early innings, had deserted him at the worst possible time, with two outs and two on in the second inning, giving Arizona a five-run lead.
As he leaned on the dugout railing in the fourth inning, having been pulled after 11 outs and eight baserunners, he had a quick discussion with Hinch about what he was battling on the mound. He was already thinking about solutions.
This was not how Verlander’s return to the Tigers was supposed to go. But reunions, no matter how perfect they might seem, don’t always follow the script.
“Not the way I obviously wanted it to go, which is disappointing for myself more than anybody else in the world,” Verlander said after the Tigers’ 9-6 loss to the Diamondbacks that dropped Detroit to 2-2 on the season. “Just like I've done my whole career, I come in here and start trying to think about what was off and how I can fix it and why it was off and get ready for the next one.”
When Verlander took the mound Monday, 3,135 days since his last regular-season start for Detroit on Aug. 30, 2017, he joined Don Sutton as the only pitchers in Major League history to make at least 380 starts with his original team, move on to make 175 starts elsewhere, then return to start again for his first club. Sutton, like Verlander, signed back with his original team at age 43, rejoining the Dodgers in 1988 after seven years elsewhere. Sutton made three starts in the Dodgers rotation before picking up his first win back with Los Angeles.
Monday was a reminder that getting Verlander back does not mean getting the 99 mph fastball, buckling curveball and nasty slider back from his prime. Verlander toiled through Spring Training working to get his arsenal in order, not just his fastball velocity but his overall crispness. He made progress, but still ended his spring looking for the adrenaline of regular-season competition to help him find the finishing touches.
From Verlander’s first pitch, Monday was a grind. Ketel Marte led off with a single through the middle, then Carroll worked a seven-pitch at-bat that included a wild pitch before crushing a 94 mph fastball off the right-field fence for an RBI triple. Carroll scored on a fielder’s choice but Verlander held it there, ending a 28-pitch opening inning.
Back-to-back one-out singles from the bottom of the order put Verlander back in danger the next inning. Shortstop Javier Báez earned Verlander a badly-needed out with an over-the-shoulder catch of Marte’s fly ball in shallow left field, but Carroll caught a slider on the inside corner and sent it a Statcast-projected 403 feet to right field for a 5-0 Detroit deficit.
Carroll joined former Twins and Nationals speedster Denard Span as the only Major League players to triple and homer off Verlander in the same game. Span tormented the Tigers during his Minnesota years, but his game off Verlander came on Aug. 9, 2018, when Verlander was an Astro and Span was a Mariner.
Verlander retired six of his next seven batters, stranding Gabriel Moreno in the third inning after a leadoff double. But Marte’s two-out walk in the fourth inning brought Hinch out of the dugout with the hook. There was no look of protest like from Verlander’s early years, just disappointment at a game that had gotten away.
“Later in the game, I think I started controlling the fastball a little bit better, which was good,” Verlander said. “But they had way too many good swings on most of my pitches. That needs to be better.”
Verlander finished with five runs on six hits over 3 2/3 innings, walking two. His third-inning strikeout of Alek Thomas was his only K of the game, and one of the few glimpses of his classic curveball. Verlander averaged 93.2 mph on his fastball, but drew 11 called strikes with it. Four of his six swinging strikes came on sliders.
“It's one start,” Verlander said. “I think that's one of the things that I'm good at is being very objective. I'm not going to sit here and say spring was OK and that was just a bad day. I don't think that what I did today is sustainable. If that's the way hitters are going to react against me, I need to be sharper than that.”
Said catcher Dillon Dingler: “I just think some pitches didn't do what he wanted to and backed up to good spots for them to hit them at. … Obviously he's thinking about some different things, pitch mechanics or whatever it may be. But I think it was just execution.”
Verlander prepared himself mentally in Spring Training for the possibility that his effort to find his better stuff, including velocity, could carry into the season. Even during some of his best years, he has spent past Aprils still building before putting it all together in May and rolling into the summer. His next start could be the biggest adrenaline boost he has felt in a regular-season game in years, returning to Comerica Park for a nationally-televised Sunday night clash against the Cardinals.