It was a tough conversation, one that Ben Verlander did not want to hear. He was a rising junior baseball player at Old Dominion and had a moderately successful first two seasons as a two-way player – he pitched and played in the outfield.
Being told that he could be play both was one of the reasons he came to ODU. Few players do both in high school. Almost no one does it in college because it's so difficult to do both well.
Every other school recruited him solely as an outfielder.
Chris Finwood, then ODU's first-year coach, finally told him what he needed to hear.
"You're not going to get drafted by a Major League team doing both. You need to pick one and excel at that. I don't want to make that decision for you. But you're a much better hitter than you are a pitcher."
That short pep talk changed Verlander's life.
Today, Verlander is a baseball analyst for Fox Sports digital who also hosts a podcast called "Flippin' Bats," a Fox Sports production available on most podcast platforms.
Flippin bats. Get it? That's what a hitter does after hitting a home run, often to the consternation of the pitcher.
Although his podcast is just two years old, it's the sixth most popular baseball podcast in the United States and the No. 1 podcast in Japan. Verlander is revered in Japan, because he was an early advocate of Shohei Ohtani, the Japanese player who both pitches and plays outfield for the Los Angeles Angels.
"As someone who tried to do both in college, I appreciate just how difficult it is to do what Ohtani does," Verlander said.
"I'll always credit my career to Finny. If we hadn't had that conversation, I wouldn't be where I am."
After taking Finwood's advice, Verlander hit .367 and drove in 50 runs as a junior in 2013 and was named a third-team All-American. He was drafted in the 14th round by the Detroit Tigers, for whom his older brother, Justin, was a Cy Young Award-winning pitcher.
Verlander played five seasons in the Tigers' organization and never realized his lifelong goal of playing in the majors.
But he faced his brother once in spring training and knocked the first pitch over the right field fence.
Brothers being brothers, Justin kicked the dirt in disgust several times and wouldn't look at Ben as he rounded the bases. From time to time, Ben puts a video of that homer on Twitter or Facebook or his podcast and lets the world know that when he faced his brother, he belted it out of the park.
Ben is 6-foot-4 and blessed with boyish good looks. He's articulate and enthusiastic and his knowledge of baseball is deep. He grew up in Goochland County perusing the Major League box scores in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Nine years younger than Justin, he's been playing and following the game so long he doesn't remember when he first picked up a ball.
But he will always remember who is responsible for both his success and the success of his brother.
That would be his parents, Richard and Kathy Verlander, who raised their boys at a time when Goochland was more rural than suburban.
Richard and Kathy knew little about organized sports, but after Justin earned a spot on a Tuckahoe Little League team and came home to pronounce he was going to be a star pitcher, they realized they needed to bone up on baseball.
His father went to the library and checked out a book on how to pitch and bat and, along with Kathy, began to work out with their two boys. And I do mean work out, throwing, catching and shagging.
"We would go out in the back yard and play catch and throw whiffle balls at each other," Ben said of he and his brother. "When I started getting older, we needed to long toss, and we had to go out in the neighborhood.
"There was a big stone quarry open field across from our neighborhood. Justin would go to one end, throw it all the way down to me. I'd throw it to my mom who would throw it to my dad who would throw it to Justin.
"I can't tell you how many times my dad and I would go up to the old Goochland High School field and my dad would just throw BP for hours. My dad would pitch to us, and my mom was in the outfield shagging baseballs.
"That was really cool.
"You don't realize until you get a little older how much of a sacrifice they made. Nothing was close in Goochland. It was a 20-minute drive to the high school and they would do it sometimes twice a weekend. They would drive us to Little League games, to the baseball academy, anywhere we needed to go.
"They were always a huge part of our lives."
Although their sons have grown up and moved away, the Verlanders' good deeds continue. They do volunteer work, including many hours with disabled veterans.
Richard is a speaker and author, whose book Rocks Across the Pond refers to a day when he was trying to teach Justin how to skip rocks on a pond.
Instead, Justin threw the rock over the pond, and that's when he knew his son was going to be a special player.
Ben was also a special player, but sometimes even when you're good, you never get the break you needed to make it to The Show.
When his pro career ended in 2019, he did not know what to do.
He came back to the Richmond area and worked for an event management company for more than a year. But in his heart, he knew he needed somehow, someway, to get back into the game he loved.
"I never fell out of love with the game, which is easy to do when you've played it your whole life, and your career comes to an end," he said.
"I knew baseball was my passion in life. I knew I wanted to talk about baseball and thought I could be good at it, but I didn't know how to get into it."
After a couple of dead ends, his agent got him a gig on co-anchoring a watch party for the 2020 World Series. He did so well, Fox offered him a job and he relocated to Los Angeles.
Now, at the age of 30, he is a major voice in America's national past time.
He has more than 120,000 Twitter followers, up more than 20,000 from a year ago, but unlike so many on what at times is an unforgiving social media outlet, he is unabashedly positive.
During the Major League lockout, he declined to criticize the players or owners and instead kept Tweeting hopefully that the two sides would come to an agreement. He would sometimes do so in all caps.
He doesn't try to break news, except when it involves his brother. When Justin signed a $25 million deal with the Houston Astros, Ben broke the news on Twitter.
"I was on a plane using their wifi when I ended up sending the Tweet," he said.
"To have my brother still playing and to be where I am now, and to be the one to break it, that was special for both him and me. We talked about it afterwards and it's something we'll never forget."
He follows ODU's baseball program closely and often mentions the Monarchs on Twitter and at times on his podcasts. He is effusive in his praise for Finwood, who he says "has a burning passion for the game."
"The cool thing for me is that throughout my entire career, I had ODU fans there rooting for me," he said. "Even when I was going through hard times in the Tigers' organization, I know I had ODU fans.
"My job is to cover Major League Baseball, but I have a pretty major platform in baseball, and I still talk all the time about how Old Dominion is doing and what it means to me.
"I can't begin to tell you how much that school means to me. I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't have the career I have, if it wasn't for ODU."
He's crystal clear that he isn't a baseball critic, although at times he'll throw a humorous punch, such as when the Baltimore Orioles grounds crew was thrown out of a game in 2021.
"My show is all about talking about the game of baseball and spreading my joy and love of the game," he said.
"It quickly became apparent to me after I started that people wanted to listen. I hear this all the time from people, that 'I'm not a diehard baseball fan, but I listen to your shows all the time because it makes me love the game again because you have such a love of the game.'
"I want to spread my joy and love of baseball to as many people as I can."
And thanks to his parents, and his own hard work, that's just what he's doing.
Connect with Ben Verlander
Minium: ODU Grad Ben Verlander has Carved Out a Great Career as Fox Sports Baseball Analyst
