Huge breaking news in Detroit on Tuesday: The Tigers came to a deal with a multi-time Cy Young winner universally beloved by fans. No, not Tarik Skubal, who's still due to become a free agent after this season. Nearly a decade since he was traded to the Astros, Justin Verlander will join the starting rotation as a 43-year-old on a one-year, $13 million contract.
With all due respect to Hal Newhouser and Mickey Lolich, I think Verlander is the greatest hurler in Tigers history. His first full season in 2006 coincided with the team's return to relevance after years as a laughingstock, as he won ROY honors while the team took the pennant in their first playoff appearance since 1987 (and first winning season since 1993). The dispassionate way to describe the ensuing years would be to say that Verlander established himself as a hard-throwing, ultra-competitive ace, hitting his peak in 2011 with an MVP-winning 24-5 season where he led the AL in ERA, innings, strikeouts, and WHIP. The more romantic way would be to tell you that Verlander starts were a weekly event that brought drama and stakes to long summer nights in Michigan. Verlander achieved two of his three career no-hitters as a Tiger, but just as important communally were the almost no-hitters, where he'd have a shutdown start going and word would travel around the state, every fan making sure she wasn't too far away from a TV or radio, just in case.
Verlander starts brought people together. By the same token, when the team flipped him for prospects in a year they'd eventually finish 64-98, it symbolized the beginning of a lot of folks' detachment from the franchise. In the years after, the once-loaded Tigers decayed into a collection of anonymous guys and a very old Miguel Cabrera. JV, meanwhile, was a stud for the Astros. He won the World Series in 2017, dominated the league in 2018 and 2019, got Tommy John, and then won another Cy Young as a 39-year-old in 2022. The next few campaigns followed the more expected decline for a player his age, but even though last season in San Francisco tagged him with a nasty 4-11 record, he finished the year well enough that he might still have something to contribute to an MLB club.
Unlike when Cabrera was chasing the 3,000-hit and 500–home run milestones, the Tigers have motivations beyond selling tickets with nostalgia. They're coming off back-to-back ALDS appearances, taking advantage of the expanded wild card through a pretty weird collection of players held together by Skubal at the top of the rotation, evoking prime Verlander as much as anyone could. In this context, signing Verlander needs to actually help them win games. If it were four years ago, the old man could take some shellackings on the mound and still be worth it for the occasional vintage moment. But Tigers fans, energized by recent success but also nervous that ownership isn't committed to sustaining it, won't be as forgiving as they were of negative-WAR Miggy. If he's not on the level of Skubal or the newly acquired Framber Valdez, it'd at least be nice if he could paper over the absence of Reese Olson and Jackson Jobe in the rotation.
I'm torn between wistfulness and nervousness. I want to believe that Verlander is the second coming of Nolan Ryan, and that he's still got a useful year or two left in that arm. But there won't be anything fun about seeing him pulled from a start in the third inning. Moreover, the main attraction is still Skubal, who won a big arbitration number for this year but will have coast-to-coast suitors at the trade deadline and the offseason. Without Skubal, this would not have been a playoff team in either of the past two years, and in light of the unresolved tension of his pending free agency, the Verlander signing feels a little like a bauble to get fans thinking about something else.
Time is undefeated, and storybook endings are rare. Tuesday's news couldn't help but remind me of the way that Ken Griffey Jr.'s heartwarming return to the Seattle Mariners ended: with a .184 batting average, a losing record, and a controversy over whether he was napping during games. But if the years after Verlander left trained me to expect the worst, there's a part of me that can still hear Dan Dickerson's voice carrying across a pool deck on a warm summer night. Verlander's got it going through six. It's February 2026, and it's also July 2011, and in both eras I want to believe.
