Justin Verlander becomes the new face of Texas-sized pressure

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The word “pressure” should be the focus of a drinking game – every time you are watching a sporting event and some announcer uses it to describe a tense situation, get sociable. You’ll be paralytic in half an hour.
 
And then there’s Justin Verlander, the newest Houston Astro. He is already being cast as the man who can face down a flood and renew Houston’s self-esteem in as many as 12 starts.
 
Verlander was moved by the newly cost-conscious Detroit Tigers at the waiver wire because the Astros, who once had the American League taking a knee, have been in a Giants-level freefall for the last month a once-double digit lead over the rest of the field has withered to three games and change with less than 30 to play.
 
So Verlander is supposed to stabilize the team’s wonky pitching staff to entertain a town that has been beaten remorsely by the meteorological thug Harvey, and give the Astros a world championship that hasn’t happened in more than two decades at a time when it could use all the morale it can get.
 
It’s a tawdry little play on the 2013 Red Sox, who won the World Series after the Boston Marathon bombing, and Verlander is the face of the new guy who helps stabilize the old faces into a march to distractive glory.
 
Now that, children, is pressure on a level that broadcasters cannot begin to fully explain. But hey, Justin Verlander knew the job was dangerous when he took it, and this is a way easier path to the ring he didn’t get in 2014. All he has to do is haul an entire waterlogged city with him.
 
Piece of cake.

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