It’s not as if Kirby Yates’ retirement went entirely unnoticed. There was a “Featured Stories” appearance on the ESPN.com landing page, an appreciative shout-out from Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley on their Effectively Wild podcast, and respectful notice around the blogosphere. Yates was no obscurity, of course. He had a couple of dominant seasons as a reliever—separated, remarkably, by five years and his second Tommy John surgery—and got a handful of Cy Young votes in 2019 and 2024. If he’d played for better teams, had better timing with his health, and starred in a shining postseason moment or two, like Sergio Romo (one of his comps on Baseball Reference) with his World Series-ending strikeout of Miguel Cabrera in 2012, he might have acquired a Romo-like aura of heroic specialness. Instead, Yates gilded his last day in baseball with a different kind of specialness by making the first and only start of his 13-year, 518-appearance career, and borrowed a little of the superabundant aura already encircling Comerica Park in Detroit on September 26.

Everyone already knew that day marked Justin Verlander’s final appearance in baseball. When he was removed from the game in the seventh inning, pitching for the team where his Hall of Fame career began, with his daughter accompanying manager A.J. Hinch to the mound, Verlander wept and the world around him stopped for several minutes to hallow the moment. Baseball has no equal in sports for occasions like this one, when its rigorously banked emotions surge, perhaps escape just a little, and are then controlled and contained again, all in congruence with the taut design and compressed energy of the game on the field. The sport with no clock is the easiest one to stop time. Verlander’s farewell connects all the way back to Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth,” speech. Although it lacks Gehrig’s tragic weight, Verlander’s finale was a kind of death. Verlander isn’t facing his mortality, as Gehrig was, but he was among the last of a species gone extinct. His departure, and Max Scherzer’s soon enough, probably ushers out the last of the 200-win, 3,000-strikeout lionhearts, who have reigned over the game and dictated its structure since the late 19^th century. (Historians noted that the Verlander-Yates dual retirement was only the third event of its kind, 110 years after Hall of Famers Mordecai Brown and Christy Mathewson gave us the first.) No single actor on the field will ever again, every fifth day, dominate a given game’s course so deep into its unfolding. Baseball’s first kingdom has come to an end. There’s tragic weight there after all.