Every pitch hurt. It got so bad that Justin Verlander, voracious competitor, uncompromising red ass, one of the great pitchers of his generation, started rooting for quick innings. Not when he was throwing. When his Detroit Tigers teammates were at the plate. This pained him to no end, but then so did his arm, and the easiest way to keep it from locking up in 2014 was to get back on the mound, and when the Tigers put up three or four or five runs, Verlander could feel his arm in full revolt.

“I was throwing balls in the cage just trying to keep my arm loose. It was miserable,” he said. “It’s funny. A lot of people say when you turn 30 everything changes. You turn 30 and everything starts hurting, and right around that time is when things started hurting. That year I threw 200 innings, and not one of them felt good. Not one pitch felt good. Everything hurt. Specifically my shoulder. I’d find myself thinking – that’s the first time in my career where I looked at the end and said, ‘[Expletive], man, if this is what it’s going to feel like the rest of my career, this isn’t fun.’ And it wasn’t fun. That scared me.”

It’s two years later, so Justin Verlander is sanguine about his lowest moments, about how they made him a better pitcher and a better person and delivered him to where he is today: back. Back to his dominant self, striking out American League hitters at a higher rate than he did during his MVP season and allowing the fewest baserunners per inning in the league and launching himself back into the Cy Young conversation and propelling the Tigers on another run at the postseason. This is where the 33-year-old Verlander feels like he belongs, where he worked so hard to get, even if he wasn’t sure he’d make it there.

Injuries tinker with every athlete’s psyche; they particularly punish those like Verlander, whose attention to detail and introspection make for a potent ally when all is well and a nemesis otherwise. Verlander’s issues started in 2013 when the mechanics upon which he so relied started failing him. A torn abdominal muscle set off a chain reaction of tiny changes elsewhere, almost imperceptible to the common eye but abundantly clear to Verlander. No matter how much he tried to revert to his old self, Verlander’s body wouldn’t allow it, and never did he declare himself hurt enough to stop throwing, not with the $180 million contract and the expectation that he eat up innings as he had ever since his arrival in 2005.

So he pitched, and he pitched well below his standard. Surgery on his abs in the offseason before 2014 set him on the proper path, though it took far longer to find himself. “With core surgery, I was a brick,” he said. “Nothing worked independently. My legs and core were like a tight attachment instead of being able to rotate. Everything I’d been doing wrong took a toll on my body that I needed to solve.”

Verlander spent 2014 searching. His posture was failing him. The core issues had caused his torso to tilt back too far during the delivery, and his arm, he said, “lagged behind” on account of that. Indirectly, the abdominal issues begat pain in his shoulder. Verlander’s velocity cratered. He couldn’t attack hitters with his typical aplomb. His ERA ballooned to 4.54 and his strikeout rate dipped to the lowest since his rookie season. He allowed the most earned runs in the AL.

“Imagine trying to throw a good curveball or slider when you’re going up and over. It’s almost impossible,” he said. “Because of the mechanical flaws I had going on, all of my off-speed stuff wasn’t nearly as crisp, either. Everything was loose, hittable. Nothing was good. But I was out there pitching.”

This is something in which Verlander takes pride, and understandably so. He still managed to exceed 200 innings in 2014, his eighth consecutive season doing so. Only James Shields and Mark Buehrle reached the 200-inning plateau every year over the same stretch. Still, Verlander loathed the notion of backsliding into an innings Pac-Man. He believed dominance remained in his arm. It was simply a matter of harnessing it.

Verlander would type his name into a Google search box, click the Images tab, look at pictures of himself and peg, with 100 percent accuracy, whether the photographs were taken during his best years or in 2013 or ’14. He knew what he needed to look like at every point in his delivery and was determined to rid himself of the imperfections. He worked with physical therapist Annie Gow in New York during the offseason and hit spring training in 2015 fully recovered and ready to see whether his optimism was warranted.

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