Everyone wants to send Justin Verlander to a beach with Kate Upton. Verlander would rather be at work, and he's right.
Verlander made his debut as a FOX Sports analyst Tuesday night, sitting down at the desk with Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, Derek Jeter and Kevin Burkhardt to interview players he'd been trying to get out a few weeks earlier. Manny Machado looked up mid-interview, clocked the suit across from him, and said what a million people watching were already typing: "Hey, didn't you just retire man!?"
Verlander didn't flinch. "I did," he said with a smirk. Machado pushed: "You gotta enjoy it a little, baby. Come on, man. Hey, this was quick." Verlander's line is making the rounds now: "They said retirement's supposed to slow down. It's not."
Machado's jab was funnier than anything scripted that night, and the internet rewarded it. But underneath the laughs is a scold: that a man who just finished a 21-year career owes it to himself to go do nothing. That's a fantasy about what you'd do with his money and his wife, and it has nothing to do with him.
Think about who we're talking about. This is a pitcher with three Cy Young Awards, two World Series rings and an MVP, a guy who was still good enough that teams wanted the ball in his hand at the end. He announced on July 8 that he'd retire after the season. His last outing came September 26 against the Pirates: two runs over five and a third innings, six strikeouts, and his daughter running out to hug him while he cried on the mound. That's a man who loves being at the park.
So why would anyone expect him to suddenly want the opposite? He appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon shortly after the regular season, and by Tuesday he was on camera for the playoffs. He found a version of the game that lets him keep the competition and skip the rehab and the wear on his arm. For a born competitor, that's a steal.
Machado and Freddie Freeman both got him good, and Freeman's was the warmer of the two. "Hold on J," he told Verlander after the Dodgers' Game 3 win, "that was so awesome to watch on that final start. Congratulations on a Hall of Fame career." Verlander answered: "I got to get to work now." He's already figured out what he wants his next twenty years to look like.
He's married to Kate Upton, they've got two kids, and he's set for life. If he wanted to vanish for a summer, nobody could stop him. He didn't want to. Treating that choice as a red flag about his marriage or his bank account says more about the people making the joke than about Verlander.
He's doing exactly what he wants to be doing, and he's good at it. Machado told him to enjoy it. He is.
