Maybe Justin Verlander really is just like the rest of us. Well, with the exception of the supermodel girlfriend, $200 million contract, and fastball that can touch 100 mph. But like the rest of us, Verlander sometimes washes away his problems by getting blackout drunk. So says girlfriend Kate Upton.
Marin Cogan wrote a feature on The Ricketts family — which owns the Chicago Cubs — for ESPN the Magazine, and the relationship between Todd Ricketts and Kate Upton was discussed in the piece.
Cogan at one point quotes a story Upton shared with the guests in a suite at Wrigley Field during a Cubs game about how her boyfriend responded to a horrible start.
“It was my birthday, and he had probably like his worst game ever, and no one had any idea how he’d respond to his worst game ever,” Upton said according to Cogan. “He vented to me in the car and was like, ‘I am going to get blackout drunk.’ So a bunch of us went out and got blackout drunk! I had really good plans to eat popcorn and watch a movie, but he was like, ‘I don’t want to think about it, at all.'”
Upton’s birthday is on June 10. Verlander was in the middle of a terrible stretch at the time. He had a stretch in mid-May where he allowed at least five runs in three straight games. On June 5, he gave up six runs to the Blue Jays. Then on June 11, which is probably the outing to which Upton was referring, Verlander was hammered for four runs in the sixth inning against the White Sox and charged with seven runs in the defeat because the relievers fared even worse. He also allowed 12 hits and seven runs in his following start, so really, any of these starts could have qualified.
But yeah, sometimes you can’t internalize your failures as an athlete, and the best way to move on is to wipe out the memory. For Verlander, I guess that means hitting the bottle fairly hard at times and pressing the erase button.
H/T The Sports Daily
