What's Up With Justin Verlander?

A lot of Tigers fans are, like me, frustrated over Verlander’s performance so far this young season, part of which is rooted in last season’s oh-fer April.

Despite a winning career record (46-36), he’s going in the wrong direction. A 17-9 record in 2006, the year the Tigers made it to the Fall Classic, was good enough to win him Rookie of the Year honors. He improved in 2007 to 18-6, tossing a no-hitter against the Brewers on June 12, and his future looked limitless. But last year he unraveled. Granted, the entire team struggled in April, with Curtis Granderson starting the season on the DL with a broken finger. Verlander managed to finish the season 11-17 after starting 0-7, but this season, although still young, his dismal stats dwarf last year’s numbers through the first month of the season.

What’s maddening is his lack of consistency. He’s as apt to go out and toss four innings of no-hit ball ─ as he did last week in Seattle ─ only to get rocked in the fifth, as he is apt to get rocked early, as he did in his next start in Anaheim, giving up seven runs on nine hits through five innings. That’s the only consistent part of his game: he willget hit; it’s just a matter of when and how hard. We fans learned long ago to not expect that he will be around beyond six innings. This kid has a high 90s fastball, one of the better change-ups in the majors and a good curveball; yet he routinely hits triple digit pitch counts by the middle innings, even in his good outings. High pitch counts are expected of strikeout artists, but Verlander’s high pitch counts can be the result of the base on balls as easily as the strikeout.

Manager Jim Leyland says he’s not concerned over Verlander’s slow start, saying only that Verlander is his own worst enemy: “Sometimes you just want something too much, too bad, and that’s the only thing going on with him right now. He just wants it so bad.”

Certainly the right thing for a manager to say to take the pressure off the guy who is supposed to be your ace, and it certainly seems to fit with what I’ve seen of Verlander this year. He can look confident, his mound presence dominant, his stuff unhittable; but give up a hit, walk a batter, and he seems to lose focus, come unglued. He seems to want to do too much, forgetting that he has eight other guys behind him who can help him get out of a jam. At twenty-six, he is approaching his prime and should know this. Attitude is what differentiates great pitchers from mediocre hurlers. Great pitchers go after hitters despite the situation. A true ace can forget that the bases are loaded and pitch as if the bases are empty, trusting his stuff and the guys behind him. It seems this is something Verlander has yet to master. Until he does, expect him to be stuck in this baseball rut, destined to be a mediocre pitcher who had unlimited potential.