**UPDATED**Justin Verlander to miss rest of the season with an elbow injury, per report

Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

Welp.

The Houston Astros have been facing some pretty stiff headwinds in 2020 although a good chunk of them have been due to their own actions. They were penalized for their sign stealing operation that tainted their World Series run and the players and team officials have handled the fallout from the scandal, well, exceedingly poorly.

They also lost Gerrit Cole to free agency and while they were widely expected to remain good in 2020, some of their key pieces are a year older and some have wondered how much longer the Astros can keep this core group together.

Their quest back to the postseason just got a bit trickier.

Now there is a lot to parse here. Verlander did make his first start of the season and pitched decently through six innings while giving up just two runs. However, clearly SOMETHING happened which caused Houston to shut Verlander down although the exact nature of the injury, and the remedy required, hasn’t been revealed as of this writing. Verlander had a couple of injury issues during his time in Detroit and towards the end of his tenure there, he saw a notable dip in his velocity so some wondered if all of the miles on his arm had caught up with him.

However, all of that changed when he got to Houston. He looked reborn as an Astro and he re-established himself as one of the best pitchers in the entire league including winning his second Cy Young Award last year. With that said, he is also 37 and Father Time is undefeated. With the loss of this season for Verlander and a currently unclear recovery time, we truly don’t know when we will see him on the mound again.

UPDATE

For what it is worth, Verlander has come out and said that while he does have a forearm injury, for the moment he is only slated to miss a couple of weeks before he is re-evaluated.