He looked a little bigger, and a little greyer. But Justin Verlander in a Tigers jersey is still 2011 AL MVP Justin Verlander in a Detroit Tigers jersey. Nine years, two World Series wins, and two Cy Youngs since he last pitched for the club that drafted him, the 43-year-old took the mound for his new old team’s fourth game of the 2026 season. I had to snap a picture to capture the moment.
I’m searching for a more interesting word than “surreal” and coming up short. Seeing “VERLANDER” and 35 on that specific road uniform takes me back to a completely different version of myself—a confused student who has yet to learn basically any lesson she’ll consider important by the time she gets to age 30. An athlete’s life advances at the same pace as your own, but Verlander’s career has taken such a strange loop back around that it’s left me a little dizzy. He’s been to Houston, and then the operating room, then Queens, then Houston again, and then San Francisco before signing this one-year deal. It kind of feels a little arrogant, after what’s become such a long and varied career, to even make the claim that JV has returned “home.” Detroit isn’t the only city that can claim him.
In signing Verlander, the Tigers are implicitly asking fans to believe in something as magical as time travel. That’s what’ll move the tickets for his starts: the belief that you might see something that looks vaguely enough like 2011 out there. In doing so, they’re hoping that MLB’s oldest player by far can reverse what’s been a pretty gnarly fall from the highs of his post–Tommy John comeback—a 5.48 ERA in 2024 in Houston and then a 4-11 record out in SF. Squint at the underlying analytics, and you could see someone who might still be worth carrying in the back end of a rotation. But this is a Tigers team and fanbase that feels the need to win in the playoffs more acutely than they have since the last time Verlander was making postseason starts for them. There will be no grading on a nostalgia curve after any rough starts.
Monday, unfortunately for everyone involved except the Diamondbacks, was as rough a start as it gets. While his Arizona adversary, Michael Soroka, racked up 10 Ks in five shutout innings, Verlander dragged himself through just three and two-thirds before leaving with the score 5-0. You could say he improved as the game went on, since he started with the dreaded infinity ERA and all his runs were allowed in the first two frames. But a couple of hard-hit balls in the third, and a walk to close out his night in the fourth, means you’d have to dig pretty hard to find any optimism from his Detroit re-debut. Even the headline on MLB dot com, about as charitable coverage as players get, couldn’t sugarcoat it: “Verlander grinds through laborious 1st start back with Tigers.”
Verlander in the glory days was like rooting for heavy rain against a campfire. But it was grit-your-teeth tense watching him try to navigate the Diamondbacks’ order without crashing. His fastball lacks its old zip, while the fangs on his breaking pitches have dulled into molars. The swings and misses were few and far between. That’s nothing to be ashamed of after two decades in the majors, but it means Verlander’s had to continually work to uncover new advantages over hitters. If he can’t deceive them, he has no chance, and when Corbin Carroll pounded a slider low in the zone for a three-run dinger on Monday, you could see perhaps a crack in his confidence when he hopped off the mound.
Maybe there’s a silver lining to getting this first loss out of the way, and as ugly as possible, to temper expectations before he makes a start at home. But after two straight seasons where the Tigers just barely sneaked into the playoffs, they may very well need every win they can get. And none of those 183 victories that JV has previously earned for the franchise are going to count.
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