ANAHEIM, Calif. — The discussions are about to turn difficult, a debate between decline and just running out of days to stop it, what is deserved, what is due and what delivers the Houston Astros their best chance of capturing a championship. No decision is imminent, but the discourse around it will dominate the next 15 days.
Nothing Justin Verlander did on Saturday night supplied much clarity. He avoided being “atrocious,” but acknowledged the 15 outs he collected were “tough.” Progress appeared periodically and premier defense spared him from an uglier line against one of the sport’s worst lineups.
“It is not what he wanted, but it’s what we were looking for,” manager Joe Espada said. “A step in the right direction.”
Save for throwing a no-hitter or authoring a total meltdown, Saturday never seemed like the type of game that would alter Verlander’s position for Houston’s playoff roster. The extent to which he’s been outpitched by Framber Valdez, Hunter Brown and Yusei Kikuchi left a gap that beating a bad team isn’t going to close.
Pitching well against a putrid lineup is still a baseline expectation. Verlander met it, limiting Los Angeles to two earned runs across five inefficient innings. He struck out just two, could not miss many bats and only showed snippets of what Houston hoped to see from him, be it better pitch efficiency, more unpredictability or feel for his breaking balls in the strike zone.
“I want to see hitters being uncomfortable in the batter’s box,” Espada said before the game.
Only the Miami Marlins and Chicago White Sox awoke on Saturday with a lower team OPS than the Angels. Only the White Sox had a worse record since Aug. 17. Mike Trout is nowhere to be found. Nor is Anthony Rendon, though his .574 OPS would’ve fit well into Saturday’s starting lineup.
Los Angeles started five rookies against Verlander. Cleanup man Niko Kavadas had 58 career major-league plate appearances. The lineup’s final three hitters — Eric Wagaman, Jack López and Jordyn Adams — brought a combined 98 big-league at-bats to the ballpark.
Never did any of them appear consistently overmatched against Verlander. Some of Los Angeles’ left-handed hitters had trouble with his changeup, a fact Espada emphasized after the game, but the Angels still averaged a 90.5 mph exit velocity on the 17 balls it put in play against Verlander. Of the 47 swings the Angels took, just nine were whiffs.
“I’m kind of in the middle. Couldn’t get a heater by ’em, couldn’t get them to chase spin,” Verlander said. “It puts you in a difficult position to be able to get outs. I felt like the stuff was OK. Velo wasn’t as good as it has been, but most of the shapes were good. They made me work pretty hard.”
Los Angeles swung 21 times against Verlander’s two breaking balls. Six of them were whiffs. Though he received three called strikes on the 37 non-fastballs he threw, Verlander did a better job of locating his secondary pitches in or around the strike zone, which didn’t allow the Angels to hunt his fastball.
Throwing non-fastballs earlier in counts seemed to be an emphasis, too. Before the game, Espada acknowledged “it looks like hitters kind of know what’s coming just because of tendencies.” After the Arizona Diamondbacks roughed him up for eight earned runs last week, Verlander appeared miffed at Arizona’s good swings “in surprising spots.”
Asked on Saturday whether that is pitch sequencing or a mechanical tell that opponents have picked up, Verlander replied, “Good question. … If I had the answer to that, it would be a lot easier wouldn’t it?”
Verlander threw 58 of his 89 pitches for strikes, a 65 percent clip that did represent substantial progress. He had thrown strikes just 61 percent of the time across his previous four starts.
Efficiency still eluded him. Verlander needed 27 pitches to finish the first inning and 21 more to complete the third. Reliever Hector Neris began to throw in the bullpen before Verlander even toed the slab in the fifth. Not since May 29 has Verlander thrown a pitch in the sixth inning.
“He’s a perfectionist and there’s still things he wants better — and we all know he can do that — but I thought today was a step in the right direction,” Espada said.
Verlander threw 16 pitches before generating a swing-and-miss. He did not procure an out until pitch 19, a 93.4 mph four-seam fastball Kavadas struck into the left-center field gap. Jake Meyers laid out for a magnificent catch, robbing him of a hit while preventing at least one run from scoring.
All three Astros outfielders made marvelous catches that spared Verlander from additional damage. Mauricio Dubón ran down Wagaman’s tailing fly ball along the left field line in the second. Two frames later, right fielder Ben Gamel stole an extra-base hit from Mickey Moniak and crashed into the wall.
Eric Wagaman racked up more than 2,000 plate appearances in the Minors before getting his first MLB hit … off Justin Verlander, no less!@Angels | @trashpandas | @SaltLakeBees pic.twitter.com/lsXgqmSYN4
— MLB Pipeline (@MLBPipeline) September 15, 2024
Four pitches later, Wagaman whacked a hanging curveball for a double. The 27-year-old infielder took 2,035 plate appearances across 514 minor-league games. His first major league hit came against a future Hall of Famer trying to find himself.
Verlander sports an 8.34 ERA across his past five starts, an eyesore that remains as difficult to ignore as it is to believe. Before the neck injury that sidelined him for two months, Verlander had finally discovered some semblance of consistency. A 5.00 FIP with his 3.95 pre-injury ERA suggested some regression loomed. Few fathomed it would be this drastic.
“I’m trying as quickly as I can to get back to that version, where I’m tougher to hit than I am right now,” Verlander said. “It’s a start-to-start thing because, really, the only time you can really get a sense for how your stuff is perceived is when hitters are in the batter’s box and there’s that instinctual give and take that you receive from hitters.”
Verlander is only guaranteed to get two more starts. Presuming the Astros remain on schedule, he will face these same Angels on Friday evening at Minute Maid Park. Faces in their lineup won’t change, but perhaps their approach will. The calendar will creep closer to October, a month in which marginal progress can’t be celebrated.
(Photo: Jason Parkhurst / Imagn Images)
