Starting in December and ending on Opening Day, Joe Posnanski will count down the 100 greatest baseball players by publishing an essay on a player every day for 100 days. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy.
Let’s go back, if we can, to a spring day in 2001. An 18-year-old Justin Verlander and his father, Richard, sit in their home in Goochland, Va., and wait for the phone to ring. It is the day of the Major League Baseball amateur draft. There is some excitement buzzing as people wonder if the Twins will take college superstar pitcher Mark Prior (they do not; they take hometown hero Joe Mauer instead).
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Father and son feel like Justin could be a lot like Mark Prior.
They are hoping for it to be a very good day.
And the funny thing is: It probably ended up being the best day they could have possibly had. But it will not feel like that in the moment.
Justin Verlander had been a dominant pitcher for Goochland High. He averaged exactly two strikeouts per inning — 142 whiffs in 71 innings — and allowed four earned runs all season. He was skinny but tall with a 6-foot-5 body that suggested unlimited potential. And he had one of those blessed arms. When he was 10 or so, Justin and his father were at the lake, and they decided to have one of those contests to see who could throw a rock the farthest.
Richard threw his about halfway across the lake and felt pretty good about it.
Justin threw his rock over the lake.
“My jaw dropped,” Richard later said. It was probably that moment when they both fully understood Justin’s destiny. Justin threw so hard in Little League (and with such shaky control) that multiple kids actually quit the league rather than face him. When he was 14, a coach named Wayne Spencer challenged him to throw his hardest pitch.
“Hey, Sally,” Spencer yelled at Verlander while crouching behind the plate, “I’ve seen better arms on a chair.”
And whether it was the casual sexism, the comparison to basic furniture or the pure lameness of the joke, Verlander gritted his teeth and broke 80 mph for the first time. Not long after that, he threw 85, then 90. One scout clocked him at 93 his senior year in high school.
“I could just throw the crap out of the ball,” Justin said.
Plus, scouts knew that there was more to come. They talked about how long his arms were, how much more muscle he would put on. They sensed that he would throw much harder.
“He’s a lot like Jack McDowell,” one scout said, comparing Verlander to another 6-foot-5 righty who would go on to become a sensation at Stanford, the fifth pick in the draft, a two-time 20-game winner and a Cy Young Award winner.
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All of this suggests that the Verlanders sit in their house on that spring day thinking that Justin might be chosen in the first round. But they know there’s more to the story. There are question marks. His velocity had dropped for a time during his senior year. Richard tried and tried to explain to the scouts that this was all because of an illness, and that soon after he was throwing in the low 90s again. But scouts are paid to be skeptical. Dropped velocity is bad. Is he injured? Has he topped out?
The Verlanders also know that some scouts question Justin’s control. He is still a bit wild — not quite as wild as when he was scaring kids out of the Goochland Little League, but wild enough to cause some concern. Will he harness his stuff? Will he develop command?
With those questions, Baseball America predicts that Verlander will go somewhere between the eighth and 12th rounds. That doesn’t seem high enough to the Verlanders, so they announce that Justin has committed to nearby Old Dominion and will go there if not taken in the top three rounds. It’s the sort of thing that people do before the draft. People who know Justin question whether he will follow up on the threat; he wants to play pro ball. Badly. It has been his only real dream ever since throwing that rock across the lake.
But, anyway, the cards have been played. Father and son wait for the call.
The first three rounds go by … and Justin is not taken. This is disappointing but not overly surprising. Now comes the hard part: How low will he be taken? Will the team who takes him make a serious offer? The fourth round goes by, so do the fifth and sixth and seventh.
OK, now, it moves into the area where Justin was projected to go, and father and son continue to wait. Still no call. The draft moves into the 20th round. Still no call.
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And then the “what the heck” rounds passed, the shots in the dark, the 23rd round, the 31st round, the 39th round, these are rounds where teams are buying lottery tickets — Wes McCrotty and Mark Comolli, Cesar Montes De Oca and Matthew Sibigtroth and Justin Sassanella.
In all, 1,469 players are selected in the 2001 draft. A couple of teams do not take single a player in the last 10 rounds because they have run out of ideas.
Justin Verlander is not drafted at all.
Sports are filled with stories of great athletes inspired by the pain of being told that they weren’t good enough. The most famous of these is the story of Michael Jordan, who as a sophomore in high school was cut from the varsity basketball team.
Well, we should tell that story because it isn’t that simple: Jordan was not exactly cut. He was a sophomore, and sophomores almost always played junior varsity at Pop Herring’s Laney High School. Jordan was put on the junior varsity team. And another sophomore, a now semi-famous basketball footnote named Harvest Leroy Smith*, made the varsity.
Jordan never, ever forgot.
* Smith played at UNC Charlotte when I was there; I interviewed him for the school paper. He was a very nice guy who was entirely unaware at that time that someday he would have an Air Jordan sneaker named for him for the role he played in Michael Jordan’s life. The truth is that Smith made the varsity because he was 6-foot-7 while Jordan was not yet even 6 feet tall, and Pop Herring wanted some rebounding on the bench. Smith, by the way, was pretty good. He went on to play professional basketball in various leagues before working in television.
The point of the story, though, is not whether Jordan was technically cut or simply overlooked — just as the point of the Verlander story is not if he was snubbed or if his threat to go to college was taken seriously — the point is that he never … ever … ever let go of the feeling.
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At his Hall of Fame speech — HIS BLEEPING HALL OF FAME SPEECH — he made sure that Smith was in the crowd.
“Then there’s Leroy Smith,” Jordan told the crowd that day. “I got cut, he made the team — on the varsity team — and he’s here tonight. He’s still the same 6-foot-7 guy, he’s not any bigger, probably his game is about the same. But he started the whole process with me because when he made the team and I didn’t, I wanted to prove not just to Leroy Smith, not just to myself, but to the coach that picked Leroy over me. I wanted to make sure you understood — you made a mistake, dude.”
Jordan got criticized for sounding a bit bitter and kind of ripping an old coach on what everyone expected to be a celebration day … but I’ve never quite gotten the criticism. It was his Hall of Fame day, and what he said was raw and, best I can tell, intensely honest. Jordan stripped himself down. He took basketball to a whole new place and the fuel he used was hunger and fury and the need to prove every single doubter wrong. He’s not alone. Harry Houdini became the most famous magician in history using that same fuel source; as the great magician and magic historian Mike Caveney says, “With Houdini, it wasn’t enough for him to win. Everyone else had to lose.” So it was for Jordan.
Jordan did not stop with his high school coach. He spent his entire NBA career searching for doubters even after nobody doubted him. He looked for the slightest slights, the tiniest snubs — when NBA stars froze him out of that All-Star Game … when people said that he was just a scorer and could not lead a team to a title … when players said anything negative, even if Jordan had to take it out of context … when critics mocked his baseball dream and said he wouldn’t be the same basketball player when he returned. All his life, he needed disbelievers.
Not every great player needs such a combustible heat source. But many do. Tom Brady still seems to cling to the dubious pain of being a sixth-round pick in the draft. I mean, come on, it’s not like he was imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. The guy was drafted by an NFL team a few rounds later than he expected. But that raw power of feeling slighted has made Brady almost invincible in his career; you still see it in him at age 42.
But how many stories like that do you hear? My friend Melvin Stewart admits that after he won the gold medal in the 200-meter butterfly at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, when he was up on the medal stand, he wanted to think good thoughts but instead ran through in his mind all those people who told him he couldn’t do it.
So many athletes need it. So many teams need it. How many times do we hear the no-respect card played? How many coaches have one motivational speech, and it is built around the idea that the world is against them?
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What I find interesting about it all is that while certain people love to be doubted, others accept the doubts as reality and move on. My guess is that a sizeable number of people reading this right now were told that they would never become something — a big-league ballplayer, a Hollywood legend, a basketball star, a No. 1 selling musician, a famous artist, etc. — because the stars simply did not align. We are too small. We are too slow. We were not gifted with Mariah Carey’s voice or Kadir Nelson’s creative power or Tony Gwynn’s hand-eye coordination.
When Justin Verlander went undrafted in 2001, he and his father were hurt and furious. Justin put on 15 pounds of muscle and jumped his fastball into the mid-90s. He showed up at Old Dominion looking entirely different from the player recruited, and the coach was awed.
“I bet some of those teams are kicking themselves now,” Richard said of those clubs that had passed on Justin in the draft.
Well, sure they were. One year later, at the end of his sophomore season, Verlander struck out 17 in a game against James Madison. His fastball was clocked at 98.
“I think,” a scout said after that game, “I may have just seen the first pick in the 2004 draft.”
Verlander was actually the second pick in the draft, after the Padres made their lamentable choice of Matt Bush. That will go down as a great trivia question.
On May 22, 2006, less than five years after not getting drafted by a single big-league club, Verlander — now 6-foot-5, 225 pounds, his fastball in triple digits — started against the Kansas City Royals. He retired the first 10 batters of the game. He ended up throwing a five-hit shutout, with three of the hits coming in the final two innings and his Tigers up by eight runs.
In the ninth inning, he struck out Doug Mientkiewicz looking on a pitch so absurd and unhittable that Ol’ Eye Chart Mientkiewicz was still murmuring about it in the clubhouse afterward. Doug was a fine player who prided himself on two things. 1. He played the game the right way. 2. You couldn’t strike him out.
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“Well, I guess that’s why he was the first pick in the draft,” Mientkiewicz finally said.
We told him that Verlander was actually not the first pick in the draft. His eyes bulged.
“Who was picked ahead of him?” he asked incredulously. “And you better say ‘Albert Pujols.’”
Justin Verlander’s hunger to prove people wrong has never gone away. It is what marks him as a pitcher, I think. His early career was just a little bit off; he was very good (he won the Rookie of the Year and finished fifth in the Cy Young voting in his second year) but inconsistent. He struck out fewer players than you would have expected for a guy with his stuff. He had a dismal season at age 25.
But the stuff was so good and his competitiveness so searing that the inevitable happened — he became the game’s best pitcher from 2009 to 2012. It felt like a coronation everyone had been waiting for. He won a Cy Young and MVP, probably should have won a second Cy Young, and while he was terrific, it seemed pretty easy.
I don’t mean that to sound like a knock. I’m just saying he threw 100 mph, he had a backbreaking curveball, he had an absurd change-up, he was so flush with talent that he didn’t even use his wipeout slider much in those days.
And, after he turned 30, when he started running into some trouble with injuries and home runs and long at-bats he couldn’t finish off, the doubters and skeptics returned and wondered: What’s this guy made of? Sure, he was terrific when he had some of the best stuff of any pitcher in baseball history and he was surrounded by All-Stars. But now what? At age 31, he gave up the most runs in the American League. At age 32, he was hurt, and when he returned he was absolutely atrocious for two months before righting the ship.
Now here are the stats of two dominant righties at age 32:
Pitcher A: 157-97, 3.52 ERA, 121 ERA+, won Rookie of the Year, Cy Young and MVP, could have won two more Cy Youngs, made six All-Star teams. Had two depressing seasons in a row.
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Pitcher B: 168-128, 3.34 ERA, 120 ERA+, won a Cy Young, could have won two more, made six All-Star teams. Had two depressing seasons in a row.
The first is obviously Verlander. The second is Félix Hernández.
Will you bet on King Félix’s future?
So that tells you: Verlander’s future as a great pitcher was anything but settled. The Tigers still owed him $112 million over the next four years, and you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone in baseball who wanted to take on that contract.
But this just put Verlander back in that house with his father that spring day in 2001. The doubters were back. And they pumped life back into him.
“People suck,” he told Brandon Sneed at Bleacher Report.
Verlander used them. For the second time in his life, he used the unrestrained power of doubt (and the love of Kate Upton) to spur him on. At age 33, he finished second in the Cy Young voting in a staggeringly close race (he actually had six more first-place votes than winner Rick Porcello).
At age 34, he was traded to Houston — nothing better than a good trade to power those “I’ll show you” fuel cells — and down the stretch, he went 5-0 with a 1.06 ERA. Then he was the MVP of the American League Championship Series.
In 2018, he again finished second in the Cy Young voting, this time to Blake Snell in another close vote.
In 2019, he won the Cy Young award, led the league in wins, innings, WHIP, hits per nine and strikeout-to-walk ratio. He struck out 300 batters for the first time in his career.
Verlander’s second chapter has been astonishing … and with him pitching as well or better than ever, you have to wonder where his career will end up. He already has 3,000 strikeouts and 225 wins and more than 71 WAR — it’s already a fully qualified Hall of Fame career. But two or three more seasons like the last two or three and all sorts of statistical wonders are in play. Four thousand strikeouts? Three hundred wins?
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But talking about those kinds of numbers probably won’t help him. I think he’d prefer people rip him. And sure enough, one of the things people talk a lot about is Verlander’s 0-6 record in the World Series. He had never pitched more than six innings in any of his World Series starts. He has never quite looked himself in any of his World Series starts. The doubters return. And knowing Justin Verlander’s history, he probably has a recording of the doubters that he plays for himself every day.
Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.
(Photo: Jennifer Stewart / Getty Images)
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