Sometimes you just have to sit back, enjoy the performance and admire the gift that is Justin Verlander’s right arm. He’s 35 years old, on the wrong end of the timeline for most professional baseball players, and yet here he is, 6-2 with a 1.08 ERA through 11 starts,youth nfl jerseys cheap spinning not just dominant results, but some of the best we’ve ever seen at the start of a season.

Actually, Wednesday’s performance in a 4-1 win over the San Francisco Giants was somewhat pedestrian, if you can call nine strikeouts and one run over six innings “pedestrian.” Pitching on six days of rest, Verlander said, “I was probably a little rusty. But overall was able to execute pitches when I needed to against a really good lineup that makes you work hard.”

That would be the low mark in ERA for Jimenez, although he’d run his record to 15-1 with a 2.20 ERA at the All-Star break and started the All-Star Game. Maybe the pitch counts hurt him — he had four 120-plus pitch outings in those first 11 starts and his command, never a fine point of his game, deteriorated a bit after that. My editor, a diehard Rockies fan, says manager Jim Tracy also had a tendency to leave him in one inning too long. He still ended up with the best season ever by a Rockies starter: 19-8, 2.88 ERA, 7.5 WAR, third in the Cy Young voting.

Greinke’s hot start landed him on the cover of Sports Illustrated, but that 1.10 ERA soon rose after a seven-run game in his 12th start and a six-run game two starts later. He settled back into a nice groove after that, and won the AL Cy Young Award, going 16-8, 2.16 for a bad Royals team. His 10.4 WAR via Baseball-Reference is still the highest since Randy Johnson’s 10.7 in 2002.

That Blue season is one of my favorites of all time. He was in his first full season in the majors and didn’t turn 22 until July. The All-Star break came late that year and he’d thrown a crazy 184 innings in 22 starts — more than eight innings per start! He went on to win Cy Young and MVP honors, finishing with a 1.82 ERA, 312 innings and eight shutouts, and while he had a long career, he never came close to replicating that kind of dominance.wholesale cheap nfl jersey china

Can Verlander keep it going? Well, going back to last July 30 — about the time he says he made a mechanical tweak — he has made 28 starts including the postseason and is 20-4 with a 1.54 ERA and 230 strikeouts in 193? innings. This stretch isn’t just an 11-start hot streak.