Justin Verlander Shaky in Long-Awaited Return to Tigers Rotation
In this story:
There isn't much that is quite as heartwarming as seeing Justin Verlander take the mound for the Detroit Tigers once again. This could easily be his final year before retirement, and for it to end with the team that launched his Hall-of-Fame career is straight out of a storybook.
Verlander kicked off the opener of their second series of 2026 on the road against the Arizona Diamondbacks, and it was a rough one, to say the least. Five of the Diamondbacks' runs scored came in the first two innings of the game.
Verlander started to find his groove after the rough start that came in his first six outs, but he had already reached 80 pitches by the middle of the fourth, so his time on the mound had to come to a close.
First Start of 2026
On only the third pitch of the game, Ketel Marte found his first hit off a curveball of Verlander's. Then, a wild pitch advanced him to second. So, with Marte in scoring position, Corbin Carroll's triple came at a horrible time.
Carroll apparently had Verlander's number in this game, as his next at-bat went even worse, because when he stepped up to swing in the second, there were a pair of his teammates out on the bases. So, when he hit a 400-foot bomb off of Verlander's slider, the score quickly shot up.
Even though the third started with a double by Gabriel Moreno, Verlander bounced back as he didn't let another hit tally up on his stat sheet and he finally retired his first batter of the evening.
Corbin Carroll takes Justin Verlander deep for 3 runs 👀#Dbackspic.twitter.com/skWmUnzkaq
— Fireside Baseball (@FiresideBsbl) March 31, 2026
For those who haven't been following along with Verlander in recent years, this is an outlier performance. Spring training went well for him as he retired 18 batters in 14 innings of work. He will bounce back from this, it is almost certain.
The Tigers are ready for redemption this season. They came up short, again, in 2025 when the team was sent home in a grueling five-game series with the Seattle Mariners during the ALDS. This roster is too good to face that same fate.
The 43-year-old can still be a menace on the mound, which is why Detroit brought him back, even if that wasn't necessarily the case in their loss against the Diamondbacks. With the depth that the team now has in its starting rotation, 2026 could easily tell a different tale than the outcome of one game.
Maddy Dickens resides in Loveland, Colorado. She grew up with two older brothers, where their lives revolved around sports. She earned a master's degree in business management from Tarleton State University while simultaneously playing basketball and competing in rodeo at the collegiate level. She successfully parlayed a reserve national championship into a professional rodeo career and now stays involved in upper-level athletics by writing for On SI on several different MLB teams' pages, along with some NCAA sites.