Justin Verlander’s 2025 season will not be a history book. After his second term with the Astros, he ended with the voice of whimper (17 games in 2024 and 5.48 ERA), he signed a one-year contract with the Giants, which felt like a potential career cap. At 42, Cooperstown was already a rock-locked resume and will never accumulate more statistics this year. When he started his 0-8 season with the 4.99 ERA it felt like the last scene of his career. No one quarrels forever, not even the seemingly permanent Verlander.
Anyway, here’s the ranking of the most war-protagonists in the past 30 days:
Top pitcher of the war, last 30 days
Now, am I deliberately throwing ERA on this table? I certainly did it – ERA is noisy in small samples anyway, but most of the time Verlander is impressive. Despite steady strikeouts, walking and home run numbers, he was 4.18 in that span and 4.55 this season. Whatever the rankings say, he certainly isn’t one of the 10 best starters in baseball. But, no doubt, he has been a solid major league starter, and given the situation a few months ago, that’s in itself awesome.
How has Verlander made things work so far? It started because it often uses fewer fastballs later in the career. Verlander threw his fastball, which was once the key to his entire offense, which was 47% of his career. It would be an understatement to say that fastball is not a cheating person. Opponents chase it outside the region less often than they did in the previous season (I don’t include him starting in 2020 with all season statistics). They made a lot of connections with their swing, resulting in the lowest number of swing strikes in Verlander’s career. You can see it in the results. In his career, our stadium values believe that Verlander’s four sales have saved 210 times relative to the average. In 2025, run 6.6 Worse Better than average.
What do you do when your trusted fastball can’t work the way you used to? Naturally throw away more curved things. Verlander threw more sliders than ever before, and he was even tinkering with his signature breakthrough court. He threw more sliders on two hits than ever before, 42% of the time. Of course, it’s not as good as his best – time is undefeated. But it doubles his four-pin speed, and he directed the bats well inside and outside the area, making it the best course for work. In my mind, every Verlander strikeout was on the fastball above the area cut below the batsman without results. In fact, Verlander got a lot of strikeouts that looked like this in 2025:
In his best case, Verlander used these two pitches and a bunch of curve balls to attack everyone. He hardly changed his approach between right and left-handed, and he didn’t need it. Almost everything in his arsenal breaks in vertically rather than horizontally, while the fastball misses everyone’s bats, and he more or less abandons the change in throwing. Why bother when your three core pitches work well? Verlander has basically not been in a row during his career.
This year, he has to make a change. Of course, his fastball doesn’t have huge lobes, but nowadays, it’s because both left-handed and right play well. You can only throw so many right broken balls to the left-handed. To add up the numbers, he resumed changes last year, using 10% for the first time since 2014. This year, he is again 10% left and right, while for left-handed, close to 15%.
As it turns out, this change is very good! Both of our pitching models think this is one of his first two options from the perspective of the original item. He didn’t chase a lot, but he was missing bats anyway. This is definitely not the way I would rather pitch to Kyle Tucker or even fall down Kyle Tucker, but it’s working all the time:
The result of all this pitch mix and pitch shape changes is that Verlander throws soft stuff in the area more often. The disadvantage is obvious: the soft material in the strike zone is hit. Verlander allowed his career-highest 0.329 Babip, and the Statcast metric shows he deserves it. He never allowed higher Waubakon, Xbabip, Xwobacon, average export speed (actually, 2025 is just the second highest speed in his career), barrel rate – you’ll name the statistics that measure contact loss, and Verlander lags behind that.
However, this is all part of the plan. .329 BABIP is not good, but it is impossible. The 8.5% barrel rate is probably the highest in Verlander’s career, but it’s basically the league average. It’s everything worth sacrificing to pursue a hit and avoid walking. Verlander’s career-fewest fastballs were overwhelmed and never coaxed batsmen outside the strike zone, but he still beat more than 20% of his opponents. Even if he seldom deceives them, he has only 7.6% of his opponent batsmen. He did not avoid walking by not avoiding walking, but by not throwing the ball outside the strike zone, which was the second highest area rate in his long career.
By throwing the ball in the middle, the batsman can be kept out of the way, but it beats the alternative, which sounds weird. If I build a model to predict walking rates using area speed, chase rate and contact rate, but force Verlander’s 2025 area rate to the career average, it indicates that his time is 10.5%. If these walks replace random plates, it would mean there are 10 additional runners this year. This is a much bigger problem than running .330 BABIP, which means in simple English that there are 33 hits instead of 30 out of 100 goals against Verlander.
There is no doubt that increased regional speed and general positive mindset also improve Verlander’s strikeout rate. When a pitcher attacks a strike zone, the batsman swings, but that doesn’t always mean hitting the ball. The batsman even fouled nearly half of the contact early in the count. Shocking courts often turn into strikes.
In 2023 and 2024, Verlander’s ever-decreasing stuff, but the unchanging approach has led to two terrible trends. He’s pitching more in numbers than ever, and he’s shot fewer than ever (except for the bad 2014 season in 2014). This year, he is closer to his professional norms. He dropped to 25.5% after he pitched 27.5% of the time on his second tour in Houston. After leading only 28.5% of the time in Houston, he was in San Francisco at the highest of 31%. In the count, more pitches mean more strikeouts on the phone, and Verlander is in desperate need of these extra opportunities. He converts the number of two hits to strikeouts less than ever before.
This pattern of reducing things but increasing regional aggression is that there are gradual declines in how many big pitchers are. You can fall a lot from Justin Verlander’s Peakin Verlander, but there’s still enough to attract major league batsmen. You just need to accept more basic hits and more opportunities for loud contact. Obviously, it won’t work forever. Ultimately, due to how the batsman hits the ball, his stadium quality will be reduced enough that throwing it into the strike area is untenable.
In fact, Verlander has already been able to cross this threshold, but only on the road. At home, he filled the strike zone with nearly professional highways. On the road, he strikes less than a decade (the entire league hits the ball with the same hit rate, regardless of family or outing). Oracle Park is one of the hardest stadiums in baseball. You can do math.
The mist was sent out from McCovey Cove, while Caberlous Triples Alley was in pain for the left-handed batsman, and Verlander could ruthlessly hit the strike. Without that safety blanket, he seemed to be forced to bite people. This cost him; he had 4.04 ERA at home and 5.29 points on the road. His walking rate is three percentage points on the road. His strikeout rate dropped by 7 percentage points. It’s not a proof of thing, but would you be surprised if Verlander realized what he had faded and tried to protect it in a friendly park in the country? If he wasn’t, I would almost be surprised.
Verlander will not join his playoff honors in 2025 as the Giants exited the game directly. If he wants to reach the top, he will need another year. After studying the data, I was more optimistic than I expected that he would have another year in the tank – as long as he continued in a place where he let him recklessly give up attacking the area. His new approach doesn’t look pretty, certainly not as good as his old plan to breathe a fire on the mound and try to hit every hitter he faces, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
