On June 18, 2006, Tigers lefty Kenny Rogers beat the Cubs at Wrigley Field for win No. 200 in a sparkling career that wouldn’t end until he’d pocketed 219 of them.
After that game, veteran reliever Todd Jones posed a question to 23-year-old hotshot Justin Verlander, who’d won the previous day in his Wrigley debut and was on his way, it turned out, to a rookie of the year award and a Game 7 start in that season’s World Series.
“Would you take that right now?” Jones wanted to know in regard to the 200 milestone.
“I said, ‘No way,’ ” Verlander recalled Monday, a day before his fourth — and potentially last — career start at Wrigley. “He basically told me I was an idiot, and, looking back, I agree. But that stubbornness has kind of gotten me where I’m at.”
Where Verlander, 42, is at is the rarified territory of a certain first-ballot Hall of Famer. He has three Cy Young awards, three no-hitters, nine All-Star nods, one MVP and — more than any other active pitcher — 262 victories and 3,448 strikeouts. The Ks rank him 10th in league history.
And he could have been a Cub. Perhaps should have been a Cub. Definitely wanted to be a Cub.
“I did want that,” he told the Sun-Times. “I tried to come here. I’d always been a fan from afar, loved the organization, loved the ballpark. It was something I definitely tried to push in that direction.”
This was 2017, when the Cubs had a World Series title to defend and were seeking starting pitching to put them over the top. But they balked at Verlander’s contract, which had $28 million on it for each of 2018 and 2019 and a $22 million vesting option for 2020 if he finished in the top five of Cy Young voting for 2019. Instead, the Cubs traded their top two prospects — Eloy Jimenez and Dylan Cease — to the White Sox to land Jose Quintana in July. The following month, the Astros got Verlander in an all-out steal for their Nos. 3, 9 and 11 prospects. It was the Astros who went on to win all the marbles.
Verlander won a total of 37 games, with 590 strikeouts and a combined 2.55 ERA, in 2018 and 2019, finishing second and first, respectively, in Cy Young voting. He won another Cy and another World Series with the Astros in 2022.
It’s safe to say the Cubs — holding their riches close in the heart of a winning window — blew it.
“Whoops,” Verlander said, grinning wide.
“I wanted to be with a contender, and [the Cubs] were good. Look, going to Houston is one of the best things that ever happened in my career. The analytics they had at the time really helped me. I don’t regret it at all. But, at the time, you don’t know what you don’t know. I was looking at the teams in the market for a starting pitcher, and the Cubs were at the top of my list.”
Cubs fans can rue the opportunity lost, but they also should appreciate the moment as an all-time great — with Max Scherzer and Clayton Kershaw as his only full-fledged peers — takes the mound on the North Side once more. Verlander might be back, too; though he has yet to scratch the “W” column this season, he isn’t seeing this as his last go-round and would love nothing more than to reach the magical 300-win threshold.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just have always had the ambition to play as long as I can. I always felt like I was blessed naturally to be able to throw 100 mph and that would probably carry me [through] a natural regression, that I would still be competitive in my 40s because I can still throw hard enough. And I’ve never lost the passion.”
Way back in 2010, during spring training, I was in a previous job when I visited Verlander at his Lakeland, Fla., home for a magazine interview. He had jet-black hair, long since overtaken by grays. He posed for photos with the pooch, Riley, that had accompanied him through bachelorhood. He had a new Porsche he was fond of driving fast and ideas about playing in the World Series of Poker post-retirement, which have left him over the intervening years.
But he also stated two goals: to have 135 wins before 30 (he ended up with 137) and to make the Hall of Fame (it’s a lock).
“I was always OK stating that I wanted to be a Hall of Famer,” he said, “because, to me, if I get there, then I’ve done everything that I wanted to do along the way.”
After Verlander won his own No. 200 in 2018, he told all the Astros that earlier story involving Rogers and Jones.
“That kid was so naive to have the balls to say, ‘No, I’m going to be better than that,’ ” he recalled.
But he was better than that. By a lot.
Verlander’s three favorite ballparks are old Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park and Wrigley. It would have been something else to see him in that last place in blue pinstripes.
One supposes the Cubs blew it.
“If only, right?” he said.
If only.
