Justin Verlander’s Latest Transformation

Justin Verlander’s 2025 season isn’t going to be one for the history books. After his second stint with the Astros ended with a whimper (17 starts and a 5.48 ERA in 2024), he signed a one-year deal with the Giants that felt like a potential career capstone. At 42 and with a résumé that’s already a stone cold lock for Cooperstown, this year was never going to be about accumulating more statistics. When he started the year 0-8 with a 4.99 ERA, it felt like the final act of his career. No one fights off time forever, not even the seemingly ageless Verlander.

Anyway, here’s a leaderboard of the pitchers with the most WAR in the last 30 days:

Now, did I leave ERA out of this table on purpose? I sure did – ERA is noisy in small samples anyway, but mostly Verlander’s is just less impressive than the rest of this group. He’s at 4.18 in that span and 4.55 for the season, despite solid strikeout, walk, and home run numbers. He’s certainly not one of the best 10 starters in baseball, regardless of what that leaderboard says. But he’s been a solid big league starter, undoubtedly, and that in itself is pretty remarkable given how things looked a few months ago.

How has Verlander made things work, so far removed from his peak? It starts, as it often does for power pitchers late in their career, with fewer fastballs. Verlander is throwing his fastball, once the linchpin of his entire attack, a career-low 47% of the time. To say that the fastball isn’t fooling anyone would be an understatement. Opponents are chasing it outside the zone less frequently than in any previous season (I’m excluding his one-start 2020 for all the season statistics going forward). They’re making a ton of contact when they swing, leading to the lowest swinging strike numbers of Verlander’s career. You can see it in the results. For his career, our pitch values think that Verlander’s four-seamer has saved around 210 runs relative to average. In 2025, it’s 6.6 runs worse than average.

What do you do when your trusty fastball isn’t working the way it used to? Throw more bendy stuff, naturally. Verlander is throwing more sliders than ever before, and he’s even tinkering with a sweeping version of his signature breaking pitch. He’s throwing more sliders in two-strike counts than ever before, 42% of the time. It’s not as good of a pitch as it was at his best, of course – time is undefeated. But it misses bats at double the rate of his four-seamer, and he commands it well both in and out of the zone, which makes it the best pitch for the job. In my head, every Verlander strikeout comes on a fastball above the zone that a batter cuts under fruitlessly. In practice, 2025 Verlander gets a lot of strikeouts that look like this:

At his best, Verlander used those two pitches and a smattering of curveballs to attack everyone. He hardly varied his approach between righties and lefties, and he didn’t need to; with pretty much everything in his arsenal breaking vertically instead of horizontally, and with a fastball that missed everyone’s bats with equal aplomb, he more or less abandoned throwing changeups. Why bother, when your three core pitches work so well? For his career, Verlander has essentially no platoon splits.

This year, he’s had to make a change. Sure, his fastball doesn’t have huge platoon splits, but these days, that’s because both lefties and righties are hitting it well. You can only throw so many righty breaking balls to lefties. To make the numbers add up, he brought his changeup back last year, hitting 10% usage for the first time since 2014. This year, he’s right around 10% again, and near 15% against lefties.

That changeup is pretty good, as it turns out! Both of our pitching models think it’s one of his top two options just from a raw stuff standpoint. He’s not drawing many chases, but he’s missing bats anyway. This is definitely not the way I’d prefer to approach pitching to Kyle Tucker, even slumping Kyle Tucker, but it keeps working:

The upshot of all these pitch mix and pitch shape changes is that Verlander is throwing soft stuff in the zone a lot more often. The downside of that is pretty obvious: soft stuff in the strike zone gets hit hard. Verlander is allowing a .329 BABIP, the highest of his career, and Statcast metrics suggest that he richly deserves it. He’s never allowed a higher wOBACON, xBABIP, xwOBACON, average exit velocity (actually, 2025 is only the second-highest of his career here), barrel rate – you name the statistic that measures damage on contact, and Verlander is lagging in it.

It’s all part of the plan, though. A .329 BABIP is bad, but it’s not unmanageable. An 8.5% barrel rate might be the highest of Verlander’s career, but it’s basically league average. This is all a worthy sacrifice in pursuit of striking batters out and avoiding walks. Verlander has the least overpowering fastball of his career and has never coaxed batters outside of the strike zone less frequently, and yet he’s still striking out just over 20% of his opponents. He’s walking only 7.6% of opposing batters even though he’s rarely fooling them; instead of avoiding walks by drawing bad swings, he’s avoiding walks by just not throwing the ball outside of the strike zone, running the second-highest zone rate of his lengthy career.

It might sound strange to keep batters off base by chucking the ball down the middle, but it beats the alternative. If I build a model to predict walk rate using zone rate, chase rate, and contact rate, but force Verlander’s 2025 zone rate back down to his career average, it suggests that he’d be walking opposing hitters 10.5% of the time. That would mean 10 extra baserunners this year if those walks replaced random plate appearances. That’s a much bigger problem than running a .330 BABIP, which in plain English means that for every 100 balls in play against Verlander, 33 are landing for hits instead of 30.

The increased zone rate and general aggressive mindset undoubtedly also increase Verlander’s strikeout rate. When pitchers attack the strike zone, hitters swing, but that doesn’t always mean batted balls. Batters foul off nearly half of their contact, even early in the count; eminently hittable pitches turn into strikes fairly often.

In 2023 and 2024, Verlander’s declining stuff but unchanging approach led to two scary trends converging. He threw more pitches while behind in the count than he ever had before, and likewise he threw fewer pitches while ahead in the count than ever (with the exception of an abysmal 2014 season). This year, he’s closer to his career norms. After pitching behind in the count 27.5% of the time in his second go-around in Houston, he’s down to 25.5%. After pitching ahead in the count a mere 28.5% of the time in that Houston stint, he’s up to 31% in San Francisco. More pitches ahead in the count mean more chances for a strikeout, and Verlander badly needs those extra chances; he’s converting two-strike counts into strikeouts less frequently than ever.

This pattern of decreasing stuff but increasing zone aggression is how many great pitchers decline gently. You can fall quite a bit from Peak Justin Verlander and still have good enough stuff to get major league hitters out; you just need to accept more base hits and more chances for loud contact to do so. It won’t work forever, obviously. Eventually, the quality of his pitches will decline by enough that throwing it in the strike zone is untenable thanks to how hard opposing batters can hit the ball.

In fact, there’s some chance that Verlander has already crossed that threshold – but only on the road. At home, he’s filling the strike zone at a near-career-high rate. On the road, he’s throwing strikes less frequently than he has in a decade (the league as a whole throws strikes at the same rate regardless of home or away). Oracle Park is one of the hardest stadiums in baseball to hit a homer in; you can do the math.

With the fog coming off of McCovey Cove and cavernous Triples Alley making life miserable for lefty power hitters, Verlander can remorselessly fire strikes. Without that security blanket, he seems to feel compelled to nibble. It’s costing him; he has a 4.04 ERA at home and a 5.29 mark on the road. His walk rate is three percentage points higher on the road; his strikeout rate is seven percentage points lower. It’s not a provable thing, but would you be surprised if Verlander was cognizant of his declining stuff and trying to protect it in homer-friendly parks? I’d almost be more surprised if he weren’t.

With the Giants squarely out of the race, Verlander won’t be adding to his postseason accolades in 2025. If he’s looking to go out on top, he’ll need to come back for another year. After diving through the data, I’m more optimistic than I expected that he has another year in the tank – provided he keeps pitching in a place that allows him to attack the zone with reckless abandon. His new approach doesn’t look pretty, certainly not as pretty as his old plan of breathing fire on the mound and trying to strike out every batter he faced, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective.