Framber Valdez would be a major upgrade to the Tigers pitching staff

While teams, fans, and baseball writers look through the individual players that could help the Tigers, there is a structural issue in their roster that adds a layer of difficulty, but also opportunity. The Tigers currently have five if not six starting pitchers ranging from Tarik Skubal to young but talented arms like Reese Olson and Troy Melton, with Keider Montero in their back pocket. There isn’t much point bumping one of those pitchers from the rotation unless you’re making a real upgrade. The better path is to build up a little more depth at the Triple-A level and focus on adding bullpen talent and perhaps another arm with a more mixed use capacity.

If the Tigers are actually willing to spend the money to sign a pretty good starter, the decisions are more concrete. At that point you probably move Melton into the bullpen on a full-time basis. Montero stays in Toledo as depth, or perhaps you put him in the bullpen as well to avoid burning his final option. The whole pitching staff is better for it.

If they just add a mediocre free agent starter for depth, they may well end up blocking a better pitcher, and it’s a lot harder to release a free agent than it is to option a younger player should things go poorly. They’re better off focusing on the bullpen instead.

With Skubal presumably pitching elsewhere next season, the Tigers do need to think long and hard about adding a left-hander if they’re willing to pursue a long-term contract with a pitcher. The two top names on the free agent market are Ranger Suarez and Framber Valdez. We wrote up Suarez the other day and he’s probably the better choice, but he’s also likely to have more teams pursuing him this offseason.

Valdez comes with a little more baggage, but he’s been the more consistently good, consistently durable pitcher of the two over the last few seasons. In three of the last four years, he’s topped 190 innings, with his 176 1/3 innings of work in 2024 the low year in terms of workload.

Here are his ERA/FIP numbers over those four seasons. This is certainly a pitcher who would add a huge boost to the Tigers’ rotation.

2022: 2.82 ERA/3.06 FIP

2023: 3.45 ERA/3.50 FIP

2024: 2.91 ERA/3.25 FIP

2025: 3.66 ERA/3.37 FIP

Year after year, Valdez averages around 23-24 percent strikeout rates against a league average last year of 21.8 percent for starting pitchers. His walk rates are consistently right around league average. The reason he’s so good, is that he prevents home runs and posts some of the highest groundball rates in the major leagues.

Over the last four years he’s averaged just shy of 60 percent ground balls on balls in play. Ground balls don’t go for many extra base hits, and the league overall batting average on ground balls last year was .249. For Valdez, batters hit just .233 on ground balls in 2025. Granted, the Tigers’ infield is unlikely to be as good as the Astros in terms of defense, but the difference isn’t so great as to change those numbers much.

We don’t need to belabor the point too much. Valdez consistently checks in as a 4.0 fWAR pitcher year after year. He does it with a heavy volume of 94 mph sinkers, backing it with a curveball and changeup that are usually above average pitches. Still, it’s the sinker that is the dominant offering here, and the same was true in 2025.

There are a few minor red flags in Valdez’s game, however. The first is simply the fact that Valdez turned 32 years old in November. On a multi-year deal you can probably expect his sinker velocity to tick down at some point in the next few years, which would cut into his effectiveness unless his secondary pitches bounce back.

While his sinker remained one of the best in baseball, his curveball and changeup declined a bit to play as basically average pitches in terms of pitch value. However, his swinging strike rate was rock solid, and his batted ball data looks unchanged compared to the previous few seasons. Both pitches depend more on his good command than elite movement profiles, and there’s good reason to believe that the modest decline in value for both pitches had as much to do with Astros’ catchers Victor Caratini and Yainer Diaz being quite mediocre and nowhere near the level of Dillon Dingler behind the dish.

On paper, Valdez should have a whole lot of teams in hot pursuit. Even before Dylan Cease came off the board by signing with Toronto, Valdez was the best, most accomplished pitcher in this free agent class. He’s a fierce competitor, he’s durable, and he has a ton of playoff experience. Kiley McDaniel ranked him as the second most valuable free agent after outfielder Kyle Tucker, suggesting a deal for six years at $168 million, with an AAV of $28 million. MLB Trade Rumors guessed in a similar range, expecting Valdez to get five years, $150 million, for a $30 million AAV.

The one fly in the ointment here, other than age and relatively pedestrian strikeout rates, is a bit of a reputation as a hot head. There was an incident in early September this year in which, working with the Astros third string catcher, Cesar Salazar as the Astros tried to keep pace with the surging Seattle Mariners, Valdez gave up a grand slam to the Yankees’ Jake Burger moments after Salazar, a minor league veteran on the order of Tomas Nido with the Tigers, asked Valdez to step off the mound momentarily. Valdez likes to work quickly and efficiently, and can get touchy when interrupted.

Two pitches later, Valdez fired a 93 mph sinker right into Salazar’s chest as the catcher clearly was sinking down, expecting a changeup or curveball. Whether it was just a cross-up or not, Valdez’s angry reaction while his catcher was shaken up for a moment didn’t look great. Speculation online was immediately full of people suggesting Valdez crossed him up on purpose out of frustration Both players explained it away as a simple cross-up, with Valdez saying that he recognized how his body language and reaction to Salazar getting hit was not a good look, but that he’d learned the lesson.

“I learned not to get frustrated, not to go crazy,” Valdez said. “Just focus on the next hitter and the next pitch I’m going to throw.”

Personally, I love a competitor. Outside of Tarik Skubal, the Tigers don’t really have a whole lot of fire in terms of personalities. Sure, you don’t want a complete hot-head who loses focus, but having a few Max Scherzer types is not a bad thing. This is really the only potential blemish on Valdez’s record, and I hesitated to even bring it up, but so many media types got busy assuming intent and making hay and clicks out of it that it had to be addressed.

If there’s an issue here, Valdez’s former manager A.J. Hinch will have a better insight than most. Indeed, as with Alex Bregman, the presence of Hinch is the main reason why Valdez may consider the Tigers over some other teams in pursuit. He’d also find major assets to help his style of game in particular in pitching coach Chris Fetter, as well as Dingler and Jake Rogers as his catchers. There’s a high likelihood he would do very well in Detroit.

Sure, it’s difficult to see the Tigers shelling out the kind of money Valdez will command as a free agent. They aren’t going to have a choice next year if they want to continue to compete post-Skubal. They’re going to have to put some serious money into the rotation at that point. Still, whether they’d do it now is a complete unknown. So Valdez is worth keeping in mind, particularly if his market doesn’t develop quite as anticipated. If the Tigers keep an open mind, and Valdez doesn’t quite land the $150 million+ contract he’s expected to get, the Tigers might be a really good short-term landing spot for him. Swooping in with a two or three-year offer with opt-outs after the first year could really give the Tigers another big-time weapon in the starting rotation, even if they aren’t quite willing to go all the way and sign him to a longer term deal.

The Tigers will have to come to terms with either deciding to pursue a long-term deal with Tarik Skubal, or recognizing that they’re going to lose him in another year, with an enormous hole in the rotation left in his wake. In such case, they would be in a lot better place with Framber Valdez taking over as resident lefty and giving the Tigers a very good, very durable starting pitcher to rebuild the rotation around. And for 2026, they’d have a much improved rotation to try and break through deeper into the postseason.