CINCINNATI — He stands with his feet on the pitching rubber and his glove held high to hide the baseball and cover his lower face as he studies his target.

Then the motion starts …

He steps forward with his left foot pointing to third base and moves his right foot in position to push off in front of the rubber. He elevates his left knee to chest level as he rocks his arms down and back up for leverage. He rotates his hips, strides forward, and plants his left foot at the front of the mound. He releases the ball and follows through, his right leg swinging across his body and landing on the opposite side of the mound.

Justin Verlander’s pitching mechanics are powerful and balanced and athletic and textbook. They’re a study in near-perfection, the envy of other pitchers, a series of highly orchestrated movements that he constantly monitors, occasionally tweaks, and forever relies on to succeed.

As he enters his 20th big-league season and first as a Giant, the oldest player in the majors at 42, Verlander has ridden his premier mechanics to an MVP award, two World Series championships, three Cy Young Awards, nine All-Star selections, and 262 wins.

“They’re beautiful, just elite timing and elite feel for where his hand is in space,” Giants pitching coach J.P. Martinez said.

“So smooth,“ pitcher Hayden Birdsong said.

“One of a kind,” pitcher Landen Roupp said.

“If I was going to teach someone how to throw a baseball, it would be the way Justin throws,” ace Logan Webb said. “I wouldn’t teach them the way I throw.”

A casual observer would maintain that Verlander — who starts for the Giants Saturday in Cincinnati — has had pretty much the same mechanics his entire career, but the right-hander would say otherwise. In spring training, for instance, he modified his mechanics to avoid the types of injuries that detoured his 2024 season in Houston, including a neck ailment that shelved him in mid-June and still affected him after he returned in late August as he posted an un-Verlander-like 5.48 ERA.

As part of his goal to become more fluid and less rigid with his delivery, Verlander threw the entire offseason, a change from previous years when he took significant time off from throwing, and has worked on a different vertical release point that isn’t as extreme as in previous years.

The 6-foot-5 Verlander, using an over-the-top delivery, has annually led the majors with the highest release point since 2017 and last year topped 7 feet for the first time. By comparison, among the Giants in camp, Sean Hjelle came closest at 6.43 feet, which ranked 29th in the majors among pitchers who threw at least 400 pitches — and Hjelle is 6-foot-11.

“Ever since I got to Houston, my release point got higher and higher and higher,” said Verlander, who was traded from Detroit to the Astros in August 2017. “But it was successful, and as long as you’re successful, you don’t want to change things — hitters were telling me they were having a hard time adapting to it, and I wasn’t going to change for no reason.

“Going back to ’23, there was some health stuff, and in ’24, it got worse, and the injuries pointed me to my mechanics. I had gone so far in one direction that my body couldn’t withstand it anymore. I don’t think I was moving very naturally.”

Verlander’s release point continued to elevate most every year, from 6.39 feet in 2017 to 6.78 in 2018 to 6.94 in 2019 to 6.76 in pandemic-shortened 2020 (he didn’t pitch in 2021) to 6.97 in 2022 to 6.99 in 2023 to 7.1 last year.

This year, Verlander wants to keep his release point a couple of inches below 7 feet as a precautionary measure to regain some of his fluidity from the past (especially his 2019 Cy Young season) and stay clear of any neck or other physical issues.

“I’m hopeful that as these mechanics start to get more engrained, that neurological patterning gets more comfortable and you have a little more fast twitch,” said Verlander, who reached 96.5 mph with his fastball in the spring. “I hope everything  trends up a tad, but it’s already better than it was last year. That’s encouraging.”

There are several reasons Verlander has such a high release point. His size. His wingspan. Where he releases the ball in his windup. The steepness of the release creates more of a downward trajectory on his fastball and slider, technically making it tougher for hitters to barrel up, a nice complement to his curveball that he has tried modifying to create more horizontal movement.

As a result, his extension (the distance between the rubber and the point he releases the ball) generally is about 6 feet, though it slipped to 5-foot-9 last season — not as extreme as others who don’t have his size. The 5-11 Tim Lincecum had close to a 7-foot extension with his prolonged follow-through.

So far so good with the mechanical adjustments. Verlander had a dominant and efficient camp — a shaky outing in his final tuneup notwithstanding — and most important of all was his good health. Despite his age and recent injury woes, the Giants, who signed him in January to a one-year, $15 million contract, might not need to be overly careful by classifying him as a five-inning pitcher.

“Based on what we’re seeing right now, I don’t think so,” manager Bob Melvin said during spring training. “I think it’s more about pitches. But, man, you watch what he does every day to condition himself to go out there and start games and give this team a chance to win, I’m not looking at him as a five-inning starter right now.”

Martinez analyzes pitchers by four stages of their delivery: drift, drop, rotate, and block. For Verlander, the drift is the manner in which he uses his lower half to begin his windup and create momentum toward the plate. The drop is the thrusting motion of his hips downward on the mound to generate power. The rotation allows his hips and torso to emphasize his upper-body strength. And the block is the impact made when his front foot hits the ground to create a stable base and transfer his linear momentum into rotation momentum.

“I don’t think the drift and drop were totally synced up the last couple of years,” Martinez said. “He can feel when he’s in sync or out of sync. I feel the last couple of years, with some of the physical stuff he was dealing with, he felt a little out of sync. So that was a big focus for him once he got here, to find his best delivery.”

Verlander said when learning about mechanics throughout his career, he “took something from everybody.” He grew up idolizing Nolan Ryan, whose fastball and curveball were legendary. Asked if Verlander has any Ryan in him, Martinez said, “I think so. There’s the nice, high leg kick, a big center of mass movement to the plate, a very strong lower body, and a very mobile upper body. I think Nolan had all those things but probably with a lower release height.”

Demonstrating how much his mechanics have changed during his big-league career, Verlander rattled through the different stages of his long journey.

“If you look at some video from ’06, ’07, and ’08, I was very different from ’11 and ’12,” he said. “And if you look at ’11 and ’12 video, I was very different from ’17, ’18 and ’19, which was also very different from ’22, and I started to not like things in ’23 and ’24.”

Verlander seems in a good spot now. It was his first spring training in Arizona after training with the Tigers, Mets, and Astros in Florida, and he realized the dry air and higher altitude affected his breaking pitches, so he’s not overly concerned that his slider was a bit off early in camp.

Through it all, he has been a valuable asset for the staff and players, especially pitchers who might not have similar mechanics but can learn strategies and the mental game from the old pro.

“I’m listening to whatever he says, his tips, advice, routine, all of it, man,” said lefty Kyle Harrison, who was sent to the minors in the final week of camp. “Getting to know him more and more, he’s such a good guy and so caring and really looks out for the younger guys.”

“I grew up watching Justin,” Webb said. “He’s probably the best pitcher of my generation. Getting to see him do it every day is pretty cool.”