The Arm Was Never the Question

Justin was around nine or ten when he and his father threw rocks at a pond near home. “I picked a rock up and threw it promptly halfway across the pond, and thought I’d done pretty well,” Richard Verlander told WKAR’s Scott Pohl in 2012. “Justin picked up a rock and threw it all the way across, into the trees on the other side of the pond, so I quickly realized that he had a pretty special arm, and as it turns out, it was also an indication just how pathetic dad was!” He and Kathy Verlander later used the moment as the title of their book about raising Justin and his brother, Ben: Rocks Across the Pond.

What followed was not a training program. It was a family improvising around a gift none of them understood. “My dad bought a ‘How to Pitch for Dummies’ book. I’m not joking,” Verlander told Fox Sports’ Deesha Thosar in July 2026. “Literally, he’s like, OK. Step one, you step back with your left foot. Step two, you turn this way.” When no one could long-toss with him, the family built a relay across a football field—father, mother, and Ben in a line just to get the ball back.

By 13 he was sitting at 79 mph. An instructor told him he had seen better arms on a chair. The next pitch read 84. Verlander’s own summary of the era: “I was young and just trying to throw as hard as I could.”

Richard eventually took him to the Richmond Baseball Academy and Bob Smith, a former pitching coach at Kentucky and Tennessee. What Smith did about the wildness was not inspirational. It was procedural. He made Verlander throw two simulated innings in the bullpen before he pitched—not to warm up, but to spend the wildness somewhere it cost nothing.

At 15, Smith used him as the closer at an elite 18-and-under fall showcase. Verlander walked three straight hitters on twelve consecutive fastballs. Smith came out to the mound.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.”

Smith told him never to say that again, and to throw nothing but curveballs. Verlander struck out the next three hitters, and the team won 1-0. “It was a defining moment for him,” Smith said years later.

“The wrong pitch with conviction is better than the right pitch without it.” — Justin Verlander, to Sports Illustrated in 2009

Learning that and being able to do it turned out to be different projects, on different clocks.

The Senior Year That Cost Him the Draft

His fastball reached 93 in summer showcases before his senior year at Goochland High School. His father remembers the scouts’ arrival as a shootout at the OK Corral, with Ben peeking at their guns to read the numbers off.

That July, Verlander committed to Old Dominion over Duke and James Madison, because the Monarchs had shown the most interest. Old Dominion had gone 19-37 the season before he arrived, and at the bigger programs that called, The Athletic’s Chandler Rome later reported, redshirting or pitching out of the bullpen were distinct possibilities. Head coach Tony Guzzo’s pitch, as Richard Verlander remembered it for WTKR’s Marc Davis in July 2026, was short: “We’ll take care of your son.” Richard also asked the question the choice raises: “How much of that happens if he’s at a preeminent program somewhere and maybe doesn’t play at all his freshman year?”

Then his senior season arrived, and he got strep throat. Will Kimmey reported in Baseball America that Verlander was sick for his first several starts and pitched weakened. The first time the scouting group clocked him, Smith said, he was throwing around 86. He fell down the follow lists, and in June 2001 he sat at home listening to the draft over an internet connection while no one called.

An area scout gave Baseball America the honest version: “He was on everybody’s list going into his senior year, but he had too many questions and never got into a groove.” Beyond the illness, the scout named control, mechanical problems, and Verlander’s stated intention to go to college if he wasn’t taken early.

The arm came back. The audience did not. “By the end of the year, my velo was back up—just nobody was there to see it,” Verlander told The Athletic. “Except Old Dominion.” His father’s verdict, in hindsight, was three words long: the best thing.

What Three Years Actually Looked Like

His first college start came against Duke, in front of scouts who had come to see Duke’s Larry Broadway. Richard Verlander always sat above the scout seats so he could read their radar guns. His son had never thrown harder than 93. The guns read 97, and according to The Athletic he held it the whole game. “I still get chill bumps thinking about it,” Verlander said in 2024. The lesson he took was short: “The talent is there: just hone it.”

Honing it took three years. The win-loss, innings, walk, strikeout and ERA columns below come from Old Dominion’s records; the wild-pitch column, which the school does not publish, comes from The Baseball Cube.

Read the walk column again. Forty-three. Forty-three. Forty-three.

Read the win-loss column. Seven and six, three years running.

Now read the rest. The strikeouts climb, and the ERA climbs with them. The wild pitches, after improving from nine to five, quadruple in the season that made him the second pick in the draft. The line does not diagnose a cause. It shows that increasing velocity and draft status did not settle the command question.

He was CAA Rookie of the Year as a freshman and led the conference in ERA. He struck out 17 against James Madison twice. His 427 career strikeouts remain the record at Old Dominion, in the Colonial Athletic Association, and among Virginia’s Division I schools, and as a junior he was one of ten semifinalists for the Roger Clemens Award. By his own account and everyone else’s, he was not yet a pitcher.

The velocity kept moving. Verlander lifted weights for the first time at Old Dominion, and by March of his junior year Baseball America reported he had added nearly 7 mph in two and a half years. The magazine did not give a baseline; measured from his 93-mph showcase peak, it is consistent with the 99 he hit seven times in one outing against Virginia. “I grew into myself,” he told Richmond Magazine. “In high school, I was tall, lean and lanky. I couldn’t run. I could just throw. In college I worked out and became an athlete.” In 2024 he said it more simply: “It wasn’t until college that I learned how good I was.”

What the record will not say is which part produced the 7 mph. Maturation, added weight, a weight room he had never used, long toss, a delivery under reconstruction, and three seasons of innings all arrived in the same window, from 2001 to 2004—before pitch-tracking units or high-speed cameras sat in college bullpens. Everyone was reading the radar guns. Nobody was measuring the inputs.

The Word Scouts Kept Using

By the spring of his junior year, Verlander was in the conversation for the first overall pick. An American League scouting director told Baseball America he had the best combination of fastball velocity and power breaking ball in the draft—and then, in Kimmey’s phrase, unleashed a fatal “but.”

“But as you know,” the scouting director said, “command is a big part of pitching.”

Through 38 innings that spring, Verlander had 48 strikeouts and 21 walks, nearly five walks per nine innings, up from just over three in his first two years. His chief rival for the top pick, Long Beach State’s Jered Weaver, had struck out 73 and walked six.

“Verlander has better pure stuff than Weaver. Weaver has the whole package. He’s got better pitchability, and his third pitch is a better pitch than Verlander’s.”

Two knocks in one sentence: command, and a third pitch that lagged. They resolved on very different schedules.

Team USA had said the same thing the summer before. Verlander went 5-1 with a 1.34 ERA and led the staff in strikeouts, ahead of Weaver, Huston Street and Justin Orenduff. Coach Ray Tanner’s assessment: “He had the best stuff of anyone we had, but his command was a little behind.”

Verlander did not argue. He told Baseball America that command was still his biggest weakness, named the mechanical cause—an over-extended stride and a front side that flew open—and named the outing where he felt it, a start against Kent State where he walked three and gave up three earned runs in four innings before getting pulled. Then he said the thing this article exists to repeat:

“I kind of realized I couldn’t blow the ball by everybody. In high school I could do that, but now it’s not going to work. I need to pitch.”

The Biggest Game

Two weeks after that report ran, on April 9, 2004, Old Dominion played its rival, VCU. The opposing starter was Orenduff, Verlander’s Team USA throwing partner and a likely first-round pick himself. Verlander later said more than 100 scouts were there, and he knew something about himself going in. “I remember I had a propensity to not be great in games that weren’t a big deal,” he told MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo twenty years later. “This was, by far, the biggest game in my college tenure.”

He threw a complete-game shutout and struck out 16, touching the upper 90s and using his curveball through all nine innings. The old reputation was still in the building: in the seventh, after VCU’s catcher stepped out at the last moment, Verlander’s next pitch went behind his head. According to Mayo, Verlander denied it was intentional and pointed to his reputation for command problems.

Orenduff, who struck out 11 in the loss, had played catch with him every day the summer before. “There were things physically he did that I couldn’t do,” he said. “My standard wasn’t to be him, it was to be me.”

The Work Had Names

Verlander did not have a realization and become a pitcher. Coaches did specific work on specific problems, and it took years.

Shohn Doty, Old Dominion’s pitching coach for his first two seasons, spent them eliminating what Baseball America called a herky-jerky high school delivery. Two decades later, Doty told The Athletic that Verlander “took off in the weight room, took off in conditioning and arm care,” and that he eventually learned to stay within himself. “He was searching for perfection in an imperfect game,” Doty said. “If he could command both thirds of the plate and stay out of the middle, guys weren’t going to hit him anyway.”

Jim Tyrrell took over for the junior season, and his diagnosis was not mechanical at all:

“He has a tendency to get ahead of himself just a little bit. He works too fast. He just needs to slow down a little bit, and he’s going to be dominant.”

A delivery rebuilt, a body built, a tempo named—plus growth, repetition, and 335 innings against people who could hit. None of them gets sole credit.

Detroit took him second overall and signed him for $3.12 million. In tenth grade he had borrowed fifty cents for chocolate milk from a friend, Daniel Hicks, who made him sign a note for one-tenth of one percent of his first contract. Asked by Richmond Magazine in 2008 whether he had cashed it, Hicks said no, then joked that he might after the next big contract.

The Year the Preparation Came Off

Rookie of the Year in 2006. A no-hitter in 2007. Then 2008: seventeen losses, most in the American League, a 4.84 ERA that was the worst full season of his career, and eighty-seven walks. The command problem had not been solved. It had been outrun.

Lemire’s reporting is specific. After more than 400 innings in his first two seasons, Verlander cut back his preseason preparation, stopped long-tossing, and threw at “85 or 90 percent” in spring training. His back arched, his landing drifted to the side of his left foot, his arm slot rose, and the velocity went with them.

The rebuild that winter was, again, named work by named people. Strength coach Javair Gillett cut back the upper-body lifting. A physical therapist stretched his chest and arms twice a week. Working with pitching coach Rick Knapp, he lowered his arm slot, restored the long toss, changed where his hands broke so he stopped tipping pitches, and set about attacking the zone. After an 0-2 start with a 9.00 ERA in 2009, the last adjustment was his own—“my mentality on the mound and the day of my start”—and from late April to late July he went 12-3 with a 2.17 ERA.

For an amateur pitcher, it is one of the most usable episodes in the career: the season in which he reduced his preparation was also the season his command and velocity deteriorated.

How Long It Actually Took

Tyrrell named the tempo problem in 2004. Verlander described solving it in 2011, his MVP and Cy Young season. Early in his career he had maxed out on every pitch; that year, Kenny Rogers, a former teammate, told him that for once “I actually saw you PITCH,” as Gennaro Filice reported for Sports Illustrated. Verlander’s explanation used Tyrrell’s word:

“Everything has just slowed down a tick. I really try to stay away from trying to let the ball go and letting my emotions get the best of me.”

Seven years, a collapse and a rebuild sit between the instruction and the result, and no one has shown that one produced the other. What the record shows is a problem named by a college coach and described as resolved, in nearly the same language, by the pitcher at 28.

The Pitch That Took the Longest

The third pitch never closed cleanly, and the honest version is better than the neat one. Verlander always had a changeup; it came and went for most of two decades. By mid-2017 he called it almost unusable, and after joining Houston he gave up trying to fix it. Then, two weeks before the World Series, it returned. “It just kind of showed up, I can’t even really figure out what it was,” he told FanGraphs’ Eno Sarris. He and pitching coach Brent Strom had no idea what to credit. “I’m sure it will evade me again.”

In July 2019 he sat down with Nolan Ryan, his childhood idol, then an Astros executive. Ryan had finished with 5,714 strikeouts and 2,795 walks—still the record—and he spent the conversation on how he had added a changeup late in his own career. “I took it out there and pretty much right away started having some better results,” Verlander told MLB.com’s Brian McTaggart. On July 30 he struck out 13 Cleveland hitters in a game A.J. Hinch described as “probably the most secondary stuff he’s thrown in his career.”

Fifteen years after a scouting director said his third pitch lagged Weaver’s, a 36-year-old eight-time All-Star was still working on it. That is the point.

What Verlander Says About Doing It Now

If a kid showed that arm today, what would happen to him? Verlander answered in his last season:

“In today’s world, if I’m a parent that doesn’t know anything about baseball, which my family did not, and you find out your son has a God-given talent, what do you do? Today, you go online, and you get help. We had to get help.”

The modern version of his father, he told Fox Sports, would probably head straight for “one of these velocity-building camps”—“a trickle down from what you’re expecting at this level.” He told the Associated Press in 2024 that he was “not envious of parents of young pitchers in baseball right now.” Thosar reports that he would like to push pitchers back toward basics: mechanics that belong to the individual, the way each horse has its own gait, and less faith in velocity as the only route to dominance.

It is opinion, and nobody can run his childhood twice. But it comes from a man who found his fastball in college and wonders aloud whether the modern path would have produced him.

What an Amateur Pitcher Can Borrow

The transfer here is not a workout or a velocity target. It is the problem.

1. Name your own “but.” Every honest evaluation of Verlander at 21 had one. Ask a coach you trust for yours, in one sentence: What is the one unresolved part of your pitching that keeps showing up? Work on that instead of what you already do well.
2. Watch the walk column. In Verlander’s case, walks were one visible sign that command was still developing. Strikeouts were the fun number; the walk column kept showing what still needed work.
3. Spend your wildness where it doesn’t cost you. Smith’s solution was to have Verlander spend his wildness where it did not cost the team anything: two simulated innings before he pitched.
4. Don’t cut the preparation that got you here. In 2008, Verlander trimmed his spring work, and command and velocity deteriorated during the same season; the response was a rebuilt preparation routine, not one magic adjustment.
5. Expect different problems to take different amounts of time. One of his took fifteen years. Someone else’s timeline is not proof that yours is behind.

What Not to Copy

Verlander’s nearly 7-mph college gain is the easiest fact in this story to repeat and the least useful one to imitate. It happened at 19, 20, and 21, across three college seasons, while his body was still changing and coaches were rebuilding his delivery. The record does not isolate a cause. That is close to the opposite of a compressed off-season velocity chase by a 15-year-old.

Oates Specialties takes no position here on how a young pitcher should train, and it is not a disinterested party on that question. What Verlander’s amateur years establish is narrower: the number going up did not make him a pitcher, and the scouts, his coaches, and Verlander himself said so at the time.

Saturday

He was 43. He had not pitched in a major league game since March. The hardest he threw in the buildup, he said, was 92, in a simulated game—and that simulated game included a simulated runner on first. With a man on, he found, he could not get to the plate quickly. So before the first pitch he warned his catcher, Dillon Dingler. “I told him, ‘Hey, man, I’m going to be a little slower to the plate than usual,’” Verlander said. “And he’s like, ‘Don’t worry, man, I got you.’” The first Pirate who tried to steal, Dingler threw out.

Nearly three decades earlier, Bob Smith had made a wild teenager throw two simulated innings before he pitched. Nothing in the record says the one habit grew out of the other. But the pitcher on the mound Saturday was still finding the problem where it cost nothing, before it could cost something. A.J. Hinch, who managed him in Houston and Detroit, said he had never been around anyone with “everything planned and mapped out” more.

He went 5⅓ innings and 91 pitches, touched 95, gave up two solo home runs, struck out six, and walked one. When Hinch came for the ball in the sixth, his seven-year-old daughter reached the mound first. The Tigers were trailing when he left, then won 4-3 on Eduardo Valencia’s two-run walk-off homer in the ninth. “Every time I’ve taken the mound, I give it everything I have until the manager decides to take the ball out of my hand,” he said. “I hope that if there’s one thing that people remember of me, that’s it.”

He finished with 3,560 strikeouts, eighth all-time at his retirement, in 557 starts. It was a long way from a catcher in padded gloves apologizing to hitters on his behalf. Along the way, different people helped identify or address different problems: Bob Smith with teenage wildness; Shohn Doty and Jim Tyrrell in college; Javair Gillett and Rick Knapp during the 2008–09 rebuild; and Nolan Ryan in a late-career conversation about the changeup. Strom was present when the pitch returned, without claiming to know why. No one person completed the process. Each addressed a different problem.

If you remember one thing from Justin Verlander’s development, let it be what he learned at fifteen and spent twenty years learning to do: you do not get to not know. You come up with something, you throw it with conviction, and then you go find out whether it worked.

Coaching Boundary

Editorial Disclosure and Methodology

This independently sourced feature is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Justin Verlander, the Detroit Tigers, Old Dominion University, Major League Baseball, or any source cited below, and it contains no product recommendation. Oates Specialties sells baseball training equipment, including weighted implements, arm-care tools, and throwing-connection devices, and has a commercial interest in this category. No product is presented as an explanation for Verlander’s development, and no image or likeness of him appears in this feature or its promotion. Reflective quotations are identified by year so that hindsight is not presented as what he thought at the time.

On causation. This feature reports chronology and does not upgrade sequence into cause.

On dates. Richmond Magazine (2008) places Verlander’s undrafted year in 2002, and The Athletic (2024) places his arrival at Old Dominion in the fall of 2002. Baseball America’s March 2004 report and Old Dominion’s records, which list 2002 as his freshman season, place the undrafted year in June 2001. This feature follows them.

On size. Baseball America listed him at 6-foot-4 and 180 pounds in March 2004. Richmond Magazine quotes him recalling about 165 pounds in high school; STACK quotes him recalling 170 pounds on arrival at college and 25 added in his first semester. The figures do not reconcile, so this feature reports only the direction of the change.

On Team USA statistics. Published records differ slightly on Verlander’s 2003 Team USA ERA: contemporary reporting and MLB’s later retrospective list 1.34, while an Old Dominion profile lists 1.29. This feature follows the contemporaneous figure.