Daughter escorts father from the mound without a dry eye in the Comerica Park house Saturday.
The games meant nothing and everything at once. Nothing in the big picture of the Tigers’s season or the postseason they’re going to miss, but everything to their retiring Hall of Famer in waiting and his family. Especially his seven-year-old daughter.
Genevieve Verlander—that’s Vivi to her family and friends, as seen on the Tigers jacket she wears—highlighted the Tigers’s commemoration of Justin Verlander Friday night with a ceremonial first pitch curve not necessarily unlike the ones her father threw in his heyday.
Daddy himself squatted down to take the pitch. The split second it hit his glove, Verlander thrust his arms skyward and galloped out to sweep her up as she leaped into the arms she’s going to feel far more now than in her first years.
“It’s been awesome,” Verlander told MLB.com’s Jason Beck about their preparations. “We’ve been practicing. She’s all pumped up about it. We actually came out here to the field and practiced off the mound one day. I asked her, ‘Where do you want to go? You want to go to the mound?’ And she’s like, ‘The mound.’ I’m like, ‘That’s my girl’.”
The lack of dry eyes in the Comerica Park house could be equaled by one thing only, and it happened on the following afternoon. At the end of a season Verlander lost to injury in April, willing his way back to make a final stand before beginning the retirement he announced in July.
That’s when Verlander took the mound for the final time in his major league life, against the Pirates. When he pitched almost like a reasonable facsimile of his classic self, surrendering a measly two runs, both on solo home runs, then got the first out of the sixth and a surprise unlike any his career had brought him before.
This time, Vivi had more help. From mother Kate Upton and Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, who’d once also managed her father in Houston. They’d plotted this very moment. Verlander had no clue what would happen after he lured Brandon Lowe into a pop out to catcher Dillon Dingler.
Hinch walked out to plate umpire Laz Diaz to inform him of the pitching change. Then he motioned to the first base side. Vivi ran out toward the mound wearing an even bigger grin than the one behind which she threw the Friday night curve. Father and daughter hugged even harder this time around.
And Verlander—one of the most composed pitchers who ever stood on the mound before tying lineups into knots; a competitor who married power to smarts and feel to analytics; a lion so intense that it took marriage and fatherhood to let him look more human than he looked in his bristling younger seasons; a lancer who’d spent his final innings on the mound ironed up for work as always—lost it.
He wept. Unashamedly, unapologetically. Even Hinch looked as though he might shed a few tears as he joined father and daughter for a quick mini-group hug. “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Verlander admitted after the game. He also admitted he hoped Vivi would understand he wept for joy, not sorrow.
This beat any father-daughter dance on record so far.
“He’s a really hard guy to surprise,” acknowledged Finch, who attests to numerous conversations with Verlander about fatherhood and family life. “He’s as planned out and mapped out as any human I’ve ever been around. And so I contacted Kate a little while ago and just tried to think about ways that we could create a special moment for him.”
It must have hit the Tigers like a ton of bricks that Verlander walked off the mound with Vivi in his arm and into the arms of her mother and her younger brother, Bellamy, with the Tigers in a 2-0 hole. (Lucky Pirate boys Lowe and Jacob Gonzalez. They get to brag that they took a Hall of Famer yard on his final day in the bigs.)
Lucky for them they could wrestle back to where a 3-1 deficit in the bottom of the ninth was, for once, just a simple hurdle.
First, Kevin McGonigle pushed Max Clark (one-out single) across the plate and Hao-Yu Lee (double) to third. Then Eduardo Valencia won it with a clean blast into the left field seats. Verlander wouldn’t get credit for a pitching win, but nobody questioned he and his family had won the day. And the weekend.
Detroit probably won’t remember Saturday’s final score as heavily as they’ll remember Vivi racing out to make sure her father wouldn’t step off the mound alone. In baseball terms, they’ll have far older memories to hold, as The Athletic‘s Cody Stavenhagen noted:
Electric strikeouts in the playoffs. Thrilling feats of dominance on so many summer days. He is best known throughout the sport for his longevity and his durability, a near-unbreakable force who lived to see an era where starters are coddled rather than pushed, where battles are won through algorithms and optimization just as much as they are heart and grit. The way he embraced it all, the old and the new, is part of what helped him outlast so many of his peers.
The family embraced again in front of the dugout and in front of Verlander’s teammates, with whom he’d share some final handshakes. Comerica Park rocked in tribute to the big righthander. He’d pitched for his heart and soul Saturday, and they knew it.
“It felt very storybook,” Upton said after the game. “And it was so Justin. That’s the most Justin Verlander thing I’ve ever seen.” She could have been referencing his pitching and his paternal vulnerability at once.
Then, the family disappeared through the dugout to the clubhouse and toward the rest of their lives. Suddenly, you forgot the grizzled veteran resembling a prospector in the mountains too long, saying goodbye to the game he enhanced, stepping full time into the family life that didn’t unmake the three-time Cy Young Award-winning, 3,560-strikeout pitcher, but remade the man.
“I never wanted to retire because of a milestone, a number or a date on the calendar. I wanted the game to tell me it was time,” wrote the 43-year-old in a social media post.
Baseball has given me more than I could have imagined. It taught me discipline, resilience and the value of continuing to adapt and evolve. I’ve been fortunate to play with and against incredible players, for outstanding organizations and compete in front of fans who deeply appreciate the game.
Don’t waste your time pondering that Saturday’s quality start might portend Verlander rethinking retirement. He knows his body would laugh and bark, “That’s what you think.”
One day, perhaps Vivi Verlander will come to understand that she did a lot more than just charm the living daylights out of Detroit and baseball nation with her Friday night pitch and Saturday afternoon escort. God and her parents willing, she’ll see she helped her father do what too many of the greats fail to do. Hell, she helped him do what too much of this regular season failed to do.
She helped him leave baseball fans wanting more. But the only thing more her father can give fans from here is a speech on the Cooperstown stage in five years.
