WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Astros pitching great Justin Verlander is a lot of things, but I don’t see “diva,” which is what one Mets person anonymously called him to The Post late last year. He’s a celebrity, yes, and he’s married to a celebrity. But diva? Nope, not really.
I do see someone obsessed to be great. I see someone smart about it, too, someone who knows when he’s done in games (but still has no timetable for when he might be done with his Hall of Fame career).
I see someone who’s polite (for instance, he wouldn’t say how recent golfing partner Steve Cohen’s game is). More vitally, I see someone who’s prudent about knowing his middle-aged limitations, which might be where the diva thing came from. In his case, his smarts may be as imperative as his talent. Or how else to pitch to age 41 — he just had that birthday Tuesday — with no clear end in sight?
Maybe he was a bit of a diva once.
“I wasn’t always the best teammate,” Verlander told me. Back in those Tigers days, he had tunnel vision about where he was headed, and he obviously is there by now. His Cooperstown ticket has long been punched.
“I was like a horse with blinders on running a race. I’m in it. This is what it takes to be as great as I can be. Don’t get in my way,” Verlander said of his earlier years. “That didn’t provide a lot of bulls–t time. If you weren’t on that wavelength, we didn’t connect.”
His previously icy relationship with his Tigers co-ace (and briefly Mets co-ace) Max Scherzer was legendary, and he says now that he’s glad they reconciled as Mets. “I’m very thankful we had the opportunity to play together again,” Verlander said.
They sometimes even work out together (both live 15 minutes from here, in Jupiter), something no one from the Detroit days could have foreseen. Verlander called Scherzer after his offseason surgery. They’re good now, so good you know Scherzer definitely did not provide the quote that bothered Verlander.
Both are also pitching effectively long past when anyone expected it, though Verlander is pitching a little better lately. Both are healthy enough to remain vital players on championship-type teams, though Verlander is a little healthier at the moment.
Verlander threw for the third time down here on Wednesday after a shoulder setback last month, and while he looked and felt fine, he admits to being behind schedule. Opening Day is in peril again. “Not impossible,” he said, “but it’s going to be tight.”
You remember last Opening Day. That was Verlander’s first official day as a Met and he hit the injured list, which turned out to portend a lost Mets season. It’s hard to recall, but he actually pitched pretty well in Queens, although his 3.15 ERA was nearly a run and a half more than his MLB-best 1.75 in 2022.
He and model wife Kate Upton loved the city so much they are keeping their Upper East side apartment, he said. As for the disaster that was the 2023 Mets, like everyone else he’s at a loss. “I thought we had a chance to be great,” he said. “I wish I had a restart. You can’t go back though.”
The “diva” comment bothered him so much he called teammates to check. “Everyone I spoke to said, ‘JV that’s not the case,’ ” he said. At one time, he wouldn’t have cared. But obviously, he does now.
Nobody can quite figure where it all went wrong for the team with two Hall of Fame pitchers, a brilliant manager and seemingly plenty of positional talent, but as with Scherzer, when Verlander heard directly from Cohen that the Mets planned not to augment the 2024 team with free agents and instead look more toward ’25 and ’26, he knew he had to go.
“We both understood the mission had kind of failed,” Verlander said.
Verlander said he heard at the trade deadline that the Dodgers and Orioles were interested, and he said he’d have accepted Los Angeles or even Baltimore if those were the options. “I’m from Virginia,” Verlander said. But when Houston, where he’d won his rings, became viable, he said he was happy to “steer things” that way.
“I’m super happy it worked out with Houston,” he said.
Verlander came back to the Astros prepared to put a punctuation mark a career that’s already long and storied. And that extra wisdom about knowing when to exit games may help him last that much longer. Regarding staying in games, Verlander said, “I’ve gotten a lot less bullheaded.”
The word for years was that he wanted to pitch until he’s at least 45, one year shy of boyhood idol Nolan Ryan, but now that he’s getting close, he’s stopped projecting an end date. He promised to keep working hard, and to keep going, as long as he keeps getting hitters out.
Regarding Ryan, he says, “He set the bar for what a power pitcher could do physically.”
I felt I needed to remind him that Ryan is “one in a billion.”
And so he responded:
“So am I.”
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