Verlander reveals he didn't know about Kate Upton's viral Cy Young rant until it was live

Ten years ago this November, Kate Upton sent a tweet that would outlive most of the baseball season itself. It arrived on the evening of November 16, 2016, moments after her husband Justin Verlander learned he had lost the American League Cy Young Award to Rick Porcello—a margin of five points that would sting for years. What made the moment stranger, Verlander revealed recently on the podcast On Base with Mookie Betts, was that he had no idea it was coming.

Verlander was live on MLB Network when the voting results came in, part of a broadcast featuring the three finalists. The moment the announcement was made, Upton began typing. By the time her husband finished his on-air interview and made his way to find her, she was already several tweets deep into what would become a full-throated assault on the baseball writers who had voted against him. "I was doing MLB Network, they had the three finalists on the air, and as soon as it came out, she was firing," Verlander said, describing the scene with the tone of someone still slightly amazed at what had unfolded.

When he caught up with her, Upton delivered a warning: "You're not going to like it." She was right. The tweets were already live, and worse—she had another one queued up and ready to send. The message she had already posted cut straight to the point, laced with profanity and directed at Major League Baseball itself: "Hey @MLB I thought I was the only person allowed to f— @JustinVerlander ?! What 2 writers didn't have him on their ballot?" It was the kind of thing that would normally take hours to craft, test, and second-guess. Upton had done it in minutes, in real time, with the heat of the moment behind every character.

Verlander managed to talk her down before the preloaded follow-up could go out. He didn't elaborate on what that second tweet would have said, and at this point, nearly a decade later, the world will probably never know. What mattered was that he had stopped the bleeding, or at least slowed it. The first tweet had already done its work—it was everywhere, screenshot and shared and analyzed and debated across sports media and beyond.

The incident became a defining moment not just for Verlander's career but for the emerging role of athlete spouses in the social media age. Upton, by that point, had already established herself as one of the most recognizable models in the world, with two Sports Illustrated Swimsuit covers to her name and a career that spanned film, television, and high fashion. She could have remained silent on November 16, 2016. Instead, she chose to fight—not for herself, but for her husband, in the most public way possible.

The tweet has aged into something between a historical artifact and a cultural touchstone. It captures a specific moment when the boundaries between private disappointment and public performance were still being negotiated, when a spouse's anger could become national news within minutes, and when five points in a voting race could spark a conversation that would still be happening a decade later. Verlander has gone on to win two more Cy Young Awards since then, cementing his place as one of baseball's all-time greats. But that November night in 2016, when Kate Upton decided to speak, remains the moment people remember most vividly—not for what it said about baseball, but for what it revealed about loyalty, frustration, and the power of a single message sent in anger.