You Heard It Here First: Verlander Hall Of Fame-Bound

This is how old Tigers ace Justin Verlander is: 25. This is what he’s done so far: won Rookie of the Year; pitched in a World Series; made an All-Star team; thrown a no-hitter.

Jim Bunning didn’t do all that. Mickey Lolich didn’t do all that. Denny McLain didn’t do all that. Jack Morris didn’t do all that (though he came close).

Want me to go back further?

George Mullin didn’t do all that. Hooks Dauss didn’t do all that. Tommy Bridges didn’t do all that. “Prince” Hal Newhouser didn’t do all that.

Justin Verlander is all that, and he’s 25.

Say hello to your next Tigers homegrown Hall of Famer.

Roll your eyes all you want. Mock my boosterism as nothing more than over-exuberant, hometown bias. Here, I’ll call the men in the white jackets myself, to save you the trouble. Guffaw from now until nightfall, for all I care.

Verlander, I’m telling you, will find himself enshrined in Cooperstown, N.Y. when all is said and done.

Don’t tell me about injuries and bad luck and flashes in the pan. Put a sock in it if you’re going to warn me of arms busting at the seams or flames burning out. I don’t want to have this conversation with you if you mean to dissuade me with sensible, even-handed talk. My mind’s made up. My decision is as final as an umpire’s, no matter how wrong he may be.

But I’m not wrong here, not on this one. Video replay will exonerate me, some 15 years from now, or more.

Not to mention how heartily I’ll be laughing at you as we watch Verlander step up to the podium in Cooperstown one August day, perhaps two decades from now, as he unfurls a speech from his breast pocket and starts in on the thanks and the memories.

I’ve already got one of your arguments countered.

Sophomore jinx? HA! Here’s what Verlander did in his rookie year of 2006: 17-9, 3.63 ERA, 186 IP, 124 strikeouts. And here’s what he did in 2007: 18-6, 3.66 ERA, 202 IP, 183 strikeouts. He gave up 187 hits in 2006, a little more than one per inning. Last year, Verlander surrendered but 181 hits, about 0.9 per inning.

The kid got better in his sophomore year.

Oh, and there was that no-hitter last June, against Milwaukee.

Hold your horses. I’m not using a no-hitter, by itself, to support my claim. Lots of mediocre, even bad, pitchers have rendered teams hitless. It’s one of the beauties of baseball, as far as I’m concerned – that the nondescript can rise up for one day and get all Cy Young-ish on us.

It’s how Verlander tossed his no-no that impressed me. No Tigers pitcher had thrown a no-hitter, at home, since Virgil Trucks did it in 1952. Not Bunning. Not Lolich. Not McLain. Not Morris. Others have done it to the Tigers in Detroit, though. Nolan Ryan and Steve Busby both got the Tigers at Tiger Stadium in 1973. Morris’s no-hitter, in Chicago in 1984, was no work of art. And Jack would be the first to agree with me on that. He walked six and threw a lot of pitches. I’ve seen him pitch many games more brilliantly that weren’t close to no-hitters, but they were classics because of his guts, his determination, and because of the situation.

Verlander showed me a lot of those things when he handcuffed the Brewers last June.

He was rarely in trouble. Yeah, he got a couple good defensive plays, but every pitcher gets those. He worked quickly, as is his trademark, not letting the enormity of the moment alter his approach. He went right after the Brewers, in complete control.

But it wasn’t just that he threw a no-hitter. Verlander is displaying now the kind of brazen, fearless competitive spirit that the great ones who’ve stood on a pitchers mound have shown throughout baseball history. He’s morphing into a blend of Morris, McLain, and Lolich – the three most recent Tigers pitching greats: Morris’s ferocity, McLain’s cockiness, and Lolich’s reliability.

As the Tigers stumbled their way through the 2006 World Series, I remember turning to one of my colleagues and gushing that, no matter the result, the exciting part was the experience the younger players were getting by having taken part in a championship series so early in their careers. Their baptism by fire would sure to pay off later, I reasoned. Verlander was one of the players I especially had in mind when I waxed philosophical about a dream season ending in a nightmare.

Verlander has a relatively easy, smooth pitching motion that doesn’t appear to be extra taxing on his powerful right arm. He’s a rhythm pitcher, and opposing batters try to disrupt him by stepping out of the batter’s box. Let ‘em try. He just stands there, on the mound, eyes boring into the hitter, calmly waiting for him to once again be ready.

There’s a certain nastiness that needs to show itself on the mound. It doesn’t have to extend any further than that, though some of the greats have been known to be grumpy bears on the day they pitched, from the moment they rolled out of bed. Bob Gibson, it was said, on his pitching days could part a room like Moses did the Red Sea, because he was so surly.

I’ve seen Verlander in the clubhouse before a game in which he’s scheduled to pitch, and there’s none of that Gibsonesque meanness. Instead, there’s looseness, joking, and a twinkle in the eye. Then he goes out there and hands you your rear end.

Justin Verlander is 25 years old. He’s 35-15, with over 300 strikeouts and a no-hitter in his first two seasons. And he’s just getting started.

Goodness gracious.

Verlander Got Some Help In The Booth, But He Didn’t Need It

If there’s such a thing as someone feeling lonely when tens of thousands of people are screaming on your every move, then I suppose it would have to be a pitcher working on a no-hitter.

Even when the TV announcers refuse to acknowledge the feat, as FSN’s Mario Impemba and Rod Allen did last night, describing Justin Verlander’s no-no at CoPa. Not once did the words “no-hitter” escape either man’s lips. Instead, they let the crowd — and strategically placed shots of the ballpark scoreboard — tell the story.

Filthy. Nasty. And ridiculous.

Not so 23 years ago, when Jack Morris hurled the last Tigers no-hitter in the season’s first weekend, at Chicago’s old Comiskey Park.

It was the NBC “Game of the Week,” — that Saturday afternoon staple. Vin Scully was behind the mike, and he continually broke baseball’s axiom of not mentioning a no-hitter while it’s in progress. From about the fifth inning on, Scully wasn’t shy to say “no-hitter” in waxing descriptive about Morris’s performance. It was so incessant that when the final out was recorded — a strikeout of Ron Kittle — and Scully yelled, “And he HAS his no-hitter!,” I thought, “No, Vin — he has YOUR no-hitter!”

Morris defied Scully’s rules-breaking and the yammering of a loudmouth White Sox fan, who kept trying to jinx Morris by mentioning his gem-in-progress every time the pitcher returned to the dugout. After the no-no was in the books, Morris spotted the fan and said, “I got it, you #$!#!”

True to the rules, third baseman Brandon Inge said that “not a word was spoken (about the no-hitter) all night.” Verlander concurred, saying that nobody sat next to him in the dugout.

My favorite rules-breaking story involves Don Larsen and his perfect game in the 1956 World Series. In a documentary I saw on television, Larsen’s voice provided the narrative as highlights from the game flickered in black-and-white on my set.

“Nobody would look at me. Nobody would talk to me,” Larsen says as we see him strike out guys and mow the Dodgers down. “I felt like the loneliest man on earth.

“Finally, around the seventh inning I went up to (Mickey) Mantle and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if I threw a no-hitter in the World Series?’ He just looked at me like I was insane and moved away from me.”

I think it’s a riot that Larsen himself broke the rules, at his own risk.

Verlander, probably, could have endured various attempts at jinxing last night. He had “great stuff”, those all-encompassing words for when a pitcher can do little wrong. He was “filthy,” “nasty,” and “ridiculous” — if you listened to or read what the Brewers’ hitters had to say after he handcuffed them and threw away the key.

In retrospect, I, perhaps, was a rules-breaker myself last night.

I wasn’t watching the game — not at first. I had ceded the TV to my wife, and was sitting with her in the front room when my cell phone caught my eye. Too lazy to walk into the computer room and check the score on the Net, I opened my phone’s web browser and went to MLB scores. Tigers 3, Milwaukee 0, 7th inning. I highlighted the game and pressed SELECT. There was the line score, in tiny but powerful type: MIL 0 0 0. One out in the seventh inning.

“Justin Verlander has a no-hitter in the seventh!,” I said.

“Wow,” my wife said — and kept watching her program.

I followed the game via cell phone until I could take it no longer. But I had a choice to make: Verlander hadn’t needed my help for seven innings. Would I screw him up by tuning in for the eighth and ninth?

Damn the baseball rules — I wanted to see history!

I sweet-talked my way into taking over the TV. And so I saw the last two innings of Verlander’s brilliance — including the amazing play made by Neifi Perez to both steal a hit and start a double play in the eighth.

I was standing throughout the ninth — which thankfully didn’t take all that long. Verlander did indeed have “nasty stuff” — stuff that easily overwhelmed any bad karma my late arrival might have wrought.

We can say it now with impunity: Justin Verlander has a no-hitter going!

No-hitter now complete. Done. In the books.

That’s the best thing about pitching a no-hitter, I would think: when it’s over with, the void of loneliness is filled over with love and support from your fans and teammates in a bursting through that certainly can’t be topped by much else.

It’s another thing that only the athlete himself can truly understand. We can only imagine.