The Justin Verlander Question

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This past weekend, my starting pitcher ranks and projections went up. While I was surprised by where I ended up putting a few players, no pitcher confounded me more than Justin Verlander. I ended up ranking Verlander at #19 and just didn’t feel right about it. After all, this is a guy who before last year you could easily have made the case that he was the best pitcher currently going. Before 2013, Verlander was simply a dominator, consistently posting across the board gaudy numbers in wins, innings pitched, strikeouts, and ERA and WHIP. His 2011 campaign was basically video game numbers as he went 24-5 with a 2.40ERA, .920(!) WHIP, with 250 strikeouts. Since 2009, he’s led the league in strikeouts three times, wins twice, innings pitched three times and WHIP once. He was a bad dude. Then 2013 happened.

 

All of the above makes what happened in 2013 all the more baffling. Verlander was still usable in 2013, but he gave us the lowest amount of wins, strikeouts with the worst ERA and WHIP he’s posted since 2009, a span of five years of dominance noted above. He still started 34 games, pitching 218 innings. He still managed 217 strikeouts, which is awesome, but the 13-12 record and 3.46 ERA/1.31 WHIP were ugly. You couldn’t bench him because of the name and he was still giving you strikeouts, but you couldn’t feel great trotting him out there.

 

So that brings us to this year and the question of what to do with Justin Verlander? For full disclosure, my 2014 projection looks like this:

 

	INN	GS	QS	W	L	K	BBI	HA	ER	ERA	WHIP	K/9	FPTS
Verlander, Justin SP DET	212	33	22	14	10	210	66	195	82	3.46	1.23	8.92	611.4

 

This was good for #15 in my ranks. I expect the ERA to stay about the same, given a career ERA of 3.41 and the WHIP to come down to 1.23. Not great, but not going to hurt you. I’m giving him 210 strikeouts, which would represent his career low, but not by much, and 200 strikeouts is still awesome. I don’t think we can completely throw out his 2013 campaign, but we don’t have to be freaked out by it either. What we do have to worry about is the huge amount of innings mentioned earlier and the fact that he is now 31 years old. He had core muscle surgery this off-season after a groin injury, which isn’t a big concern by itself, but is one more thing to think about. There is precedent for Verlander rebounding from a poor season as well. In 2008, Verlander went 11-17 with a 4.84ERA/1.40 WHIP and only 163 strikeouts across 201 innings. After that, he basically dominated for the next four years.

 

While it is hard to see a known beast like Verlander sitting at #15, I am comfortable with that ranking. He should continue to be an elite source of strikeouts, and outside of 2011 and 2012, was never an elite ERA guy anyway. I’d be comfortable with him as a high end #2 on my team, I’m just not counting on him to be the anchor of my rotation. I can see drafting him and pairing him with another high end #2 pitcher to head off a solid rotation as well. That said, I wouldn’t make the jump until about round 6 on him, which means I probably won’t be getting him anywhere. We know what he is capable of when he’s right, those innings scare me though, after seeing what happened last year. I’m not totally ignoring him this year, just treading carefully.

 

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you’re doing with him in the comments!