Game 5: 1st inning

I dislike listening to the announcers, but Tim McCarver might have a point in noting that Justin Verlander is nervous. The kid has a nasty fastball, but it appears to be all over the place in the bottom of the first. Infielders and catcher Pudge Rodriguez have paid a few visits in attempt to settle the kid down. The pitching coach even went out to the mound to relax Verlander.

It doesn’t appear as if manager Jim Leyland is going to mess around tonight. Just one out and two free passes into the game and Leyland has the ‘pen up. It’s definitely an all-hands-on-deck game for the down-to-the-wire Tigers.

According to the media guide, Verlander was born in February of 1983. That was the sixth grade for me where a school year was heading toward the backstretch and the move from James Buchanan Elementary to Wheatland Junior High was quickly approaching. If someone were to tell me what I was doing on the day Verlander was born, I probably can remember it.

My guess is it involved something at John May’s house on Wilson Drive. We probably played basketball or threw mulch at cars as they drove past.

Hey, it was Lancaster, Pa. in 1983. We only got MTV a few months earlier.

Anyway, Verlander is only 23. When I was 23 I wasn’t pitching in an elimination game of the World Series. I most likely was hanging around some people who didn’t really like me all that much in Philadelphia. Luckily for everyone involved, I doubt those people and me have seen each other since I was 23.

In case they are reading this (which they aren’t) I still look the same, but I’m much thinner now.

Yet despite the three walks and two wild pitches, Verlander escaped the inning unscathed when Carlos Guillen made a dynamic on-the-run throw to cut down Ronnie Belliard at first. Before heading to commercial, the Fox cameras caught Verlander giving an emphatic fist pump kind of like Johnny Drama’s “VICTORY!”

Is that what the kid needed to relax?