Jason Benetti didn’t know Justin Verlander’s daughter was about to race onto the field at Comerica Park on Saturday, and once she did, he couldn’t shake the moment for hours.
Benetti, who called Verlander’s final career start for Detroit SportsNet before shifting to NBC’s Wild Card coverage this week, was asked about the moment during a conference call with reporters on Monday. When A.J. Hinch walked out to remove Verlander, the Tigers manager bypassed the mound and waved toward the stands, where Verlander’s 7-year-old daughter Genevieve sprinted out to wrap her father in a hug as his teammates gathered around them.
Justin Verlander walks off the mound at Comerica Park for the final time.
This is exactly where it was supposed to end. ❤️😭 pic.twitter.com/dhJF0Kz08X
— Benson (@Miggysbat) September 26, 2026
Benetti was on the air as the moment unfolded and had to react as it happened because, as he explained Monday, he was as surprised as the viewers at home, with the plan kept to a small circle inside the organization.
“No, I did not know. There were only a couple people, in my understanding, who knew,” he said. “A.J. Hinch knew. A member of the Tigers staff who was helping coordinate with Kate (Upton) and Genevieve and Bellamy and the family. And that was it, in my understanding.”
The start capped a 22-year career in which Verlander won three Cy Young Awards and two World Series titles, and it marked his first appearance on the Comerica Park mound in 3,324 days. The 43-year-old struck out six over nearly six innings in the finale and exited with Detroit trailing 2-0, before Eduardo Valencia launched a two-run walk-off homer to hand the Tigers a 4-3 win, with Benetti bellowing, “The Tigers do it for JV!” on the call.
DID IT FOR JV !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/iBsZC0CFvA
— Detroit Tigers (@tigers) September 26, 2026
Benetti’s play-by-play drew widespread praise for the restraint he showed as the Verlander family embrace unfolded, including his on-air observation that the speed at which Genevieve reached the mound might have been the most meaningful thing anyone saw all afternoon. On Monday, he said the day’s emotion stayed with him well after he got home.
“I don’t know if you’re going to see anything more emotional than that at a sporting event in a family sense for quite some time,” he said. “And it struck me, I went to sleep, like, almost immediately when I got back for an hour and then woke back up and was thinking about this for hours afterward because it was just such an emotionally charged day.
“But I think that was in part the sort of reckoning with the idea that generations pass.
“So, there are Tigers fans in the stands who, when they first saw Justin Verlander pitch, they were new parents, and now their kids are 20 or 21. Or you stop and you think, well, I saw that first start with my dad on the couch and now he’s gone. Right? A lot changes in 20 years in all of our lives. I think for anybody watching that, there was this moment of sort of contention with mortality almost that life flows and continues and never stops.”
Benetti added that watching Verlander evolve from what he described as a “pretty irascible” young pitcher, by reputation, into one of the most devoted fathers in the sport left him “extraordinarily touched.”
Benetti will call the Red Sox-Yankees Wild Card Series for NBC this week alongside Lou Merloni, Joe Girardi and Anthony Rizzo.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.