Verlander honestly assesses his Giants debut in loss to Reds

Justin Verlander shared an honest assessment of his Giants debut in San Francisco's 3-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds on Saturday at Great American Ball Park.

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Mar 29, 2025 - 17:34
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Verlander honestly assesses his Giants debut in loss to Reds

Verlander honestly assesses his Giants debut in loss to Reds originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

CINCINNATI — Justin Verlander has seen just about everything this game has to offer over the past 20 years, good and bad. But he probably has never before been on a team that struck out 17 times in one game and just once the next time out. 

That’s how Giants hitters have started this season, and because baseball is so often a strange game, they won the first one and lost the second. There was much better contact Saturday, but it led to just two runs of support for Verlander, who took a no-decision in his Giants debut.

After the 3-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds, Verlander assessed his performance as “decent.” He’s happy to be healthy and throwing well, but it didn’t lead to a win Saturday. It was the kind of day that left him neither frustrated nor overly encouraged. 

“Our job is to win, I like winning. I wasn’t able to do that today,” he said. “I think if we’re a couple starts in I probably have one more inning in there. I think I had mid-eighties in my pitch count and that was about the highest I had gone in spring, so we didn’t want to have a situation where I’m out there and have to throw 100-plus or get pulled in the middle of an inning and have to leave a big situation. We didn’t win the game. Ultimately my guys kind of gave me a two-run lead and I would have liked to be able to hold that, but I usually try to take a pretty objective view of my performance, good or bad. 

“I think this was OK. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t bad. It definitely was a step forward from last season, I can say that.”

Verlander threw 83 pitches, leaning heavily on a four-seamer that had a little extra juice in big spots. It was his breaking balls, though, that led to a couple of runs. 

With a two-run lead, he hung a slider to Matt McLain in the third and gave up a solo homer. Two innings later, with a runner on second, he went up against Reds star Elly De La Cruz, who had been frozen by a perfect curve in the first inning. 

Verlander threw a curveball to get to 0-2 and tried to bait De La Cruz with another one in the dirt. A two-strike slider was just off the plate inside, and De La Cruz again watched it. When Verlander went back to the curve, it was bounced into right to tie the game.

“Elly kind of put it in the right spot,” Verlander said. “That’s baseball. You can beat yourself up as a pitcher on many things, but if you make a pitch and the guy doesn’t hit it hard and he gets it in the right spot, you’ve got to tip your cap and move on. He laid off a really good slider the pitch before that. That’s what the best players in the game do.”

With this being Verlander’s first start, there wasn’t any conversation about pushing him. Spencer Bivens took over in the sixth and gave up a go-ahead homer to Christian Encarnacion-Strand, and the Giants hit into double plays in three of their final four innings. 

Their last chance came in the eighth, when Tyler Fitzgerald led off with a single. Heliot Ramos saw eight pitches in the next at-bat but Fitzgerald didn’t take off, and Ramos bounced into a double play. The Giants wouldn’t reach base again, but Melvin said he didn’t regret the sequence. 

Fitzgerald is the fastest player on the roster and always has the green light, but reliever Graham Ashcraft was too quick to the plate for him to get a good jump. The Giants had his times around 1.2 seconds to the plate. 

“We’ve got some guys at the top of the order that are up that we feel pretty good about,” he said. “Obviously the double play balls hurt us, but I think there are times you pick your spots to go. Maybe that wasn’t one of them.”

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