This should be one of the top groups in the league, and the projections haven’t even caught up with Casey Mize yet.
On Saturday, the Detroit Tigers announced that they had optioned right-handed starter Keider Montero to Triple-A Toledo. The move set the Opening Day rotation, with Casey Mize and top prospect Jackson Jobe earning the final two spots. Now that the starting five are finalized, let’s see how they stack up to the rest of the league.
In 2024, the Detroit Tigers starting rotation ranked sixth among all 30 major league teams in FanGraphs wins above replacement calculation, fWAR. Of course, they got there via non-traditional means, as they really only had Tarik Skubal and Montero pitching as full time regular starters from July through September.
The Tigers were fourth best in terms of ERA with a 3.69 mark and second behind the Atlanta Braves in terms of fielding independent pitching (FIP) at 3.58. Despite a popular reputation as more of a pitch to contact style club, they were actually eighth best in strikeout rate at 23.5 percent, third best in walk percentage at 6.6 percent, and had the fourth lowest home runs allowed per nine innings mark at 0.99 HR/9. Their elite outfield defense, at least when Parker Meadows was on the active roster, certainly helped them prevent runs, but Tigers pitching was excellent even in a fielding independent context.
There’s a good chance the Tigers will be even better this season, and their rotation and high quality depth in the minor leagues, is their best argument for a return to the postseason in 2025.
Tarik Skubal
Obviously the whole unit is led by the reigning AL Cy Young award winner. It’s often very difficult for a pitcher to repeat a season like Skubal had in 2024, but he’s looked great in spring camp and is a very good bet to follow in the steps of Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer with consecutive seasons as one of the game’s top three pitchers.
Skubal was good for 192 innings and 31 starts in 2024, and missed no time to injury. He then went on to make three postseason starts totaling 19 innings with a 2.37 ERA/2.38 FIP combination, good for 5.9 fWAR. That steady but overpowering dominance was the biggest factor for the Tigers both in the regular season and in terms of carrying them to a nice little postseason run through the Wild Card round. No doubt they’ll need another great season for their ace for the Tigers to get back to October in 2025.
FanGraphs ZiPS projection system forecasts a very similar season in 2025. Skubal is forecast for 170 2⁄3 innings—remember, projection systems are very conservative about workload—and a 2.74 ERA/2.62 FIP combination. That would give him 5.2 fWAR. As long as Skubal is healthy, he’s a very good bet to beat that value projection.
Jack Flaherty
Scott Harris’ offseason would’ve looked pretty lousy had Mr. Flaherty not struggled to get the long-term deal he was looking for. Instead he returns to the Tigers for $25M and a player option for 2026 at $10M, increasing to $20M if he’s healthy enough to give them 15 starts this season. Barring a major injury that shouldn’t be an issue for him.
The right-hander is coming off his best season since his 2019 breakout. Tigers pitching coach Chris Fetter and his staff convinced Flaherty that his cutter release was impacting the way his fourseam fastball was playing in the zone, and he ditched that pitch to focus on his best three offerings, the fastball and his lethal slider and knuckle curve combination.
Things went very well, though Flaherty struggled down the stretch somewhat after getting traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers for top catching prospect Thayron Liranzo and shortstop Trey Sweeney. He posted a 3.17 ERA/3.48 FIP combination over 162 innings of work. That performance was worth 3.2 fWAR.
Flaherty put up the fourth highest strikeout rate among qualified major league starters, punching out 29.9 percent of hitters faced. His excellent 5.9 percent walk rate ranked 16th. He was a little more vulnerable to the long ball with the Dodgers, and that hurt his overall numbers, finishing with a 1.33 HR/9, which was pretty pedestrian.
Flaherty has been tinkering with his stuff this spring, and the Tigers slow played him early in camp due to the fact that he won a World Series with the Dodgers and pitched deeper into the season than anyone. He didn’t exactly hit the ground running, but continues to look very much like the dominant Flaherty we saw last year as one of the five best starting pitchers in baseball prior to the trade to LA. He wrapped up his spring with a dominant six innings over the Braves on Saturday. His velocity has been a tick lighter than his best work last season, but his stuff and command are sharp and he looks to be rounding into peak form at exactly the right time.
ZiPS takes Flaherty’s extensive injury history into account, forecasting 25 starts and 135 1⁄3 innings thrown. He’s projected for a little regression in his strikeout and walk rates, but should benefit again for a little more home run suppression courtesy of Comerica Park. A 3.86 ERA/3.88 FIP is projected, worth 2.2 fWAR. If he’s healthy again he should beat that without much trouble, but his history of shoulder trouble and the fact that he ran out of gas late in the season says we should take those concerns seriously.
He looked very good in his fine tune-up on Saturday.
Reese Olson
After his breakout 2023 campaign, the 25-year-old Olson came back for more in his second year. Some shoulder soreness kept him largely under wraps in the second half of the season, but he still threw 112 1⁄3 innings with a 3.53 ERA/3.17 FIP combination worth 2.4 fWAR last year. A healthy Olson is quite likely to be the Tigers second most valuable starting pitcher.
Olson isn’t quite the strikeout artist that Skubal and Flaherty are, but he has the stuff to equal them. Olson’s slider is an easy plus pitch, his changeup is one of the best in the game, and he packs a pretty good overhand curveball as a change of pace pitch. The major development that helped him take the leap over the past two seasons was improved fastball command and the integration of both a sinker and a fourseamer to his pitch mix. It didn’t hurt that he added a little more velocity either.
At this point, Olson isn’t the big-time strikeout artist of the group but he gets his share of punchouts. Even better, he’s done a really nice job limiting walks. His bread and butter remains his ability to suppress hard contact in the air. His 0.56 HR/9 mark in 2024 showed him solving one of his biggest issues as a prospect by using the slider more to keep hitters off balance and improving his overall fastball command. Among starting pitchers with 100 or more innings in 2024, Olson had the seventh best HR/9 mark, making him exceedingly difficult to put up big numbers against.
ZIPS forecasts 24 starts and 116 1⁄3 innings this season with a 3.95 ERA/3.81 FIP combination good for 1.8 fWAR. Olson has already thrown 140 innings in a season back in 2023, so his value is just a question of staying healthy and being able to give the Tigers more innings than that.
Casey Mize
With six weeks left until his 28th birthday, the former first overall pick back in 2018 hasn’t had the career he was expecting to date. He was effective in his full season debut back in 2021, but a UCL tear the next spring cost him nearly all of the 2022 season, and he wasn’t back in action until 2024. Mize actually performed pretty well in his return to duty. His fastball velocity was up significantly following the surgery, and it was his secondary pitches and a lack of whiffs that kept him from breaking out.
Mize made 20 starts last season, spinning 102 1⁄3 innings of work with a 4.49 ERA/3.95 FIP combination. That’s solid mid-rotation work, but this spring he looks primed for a real breakout. Recognizing that his splitter-slider combination just wasn’t getting it done at the major league level, Mize spent the offseason in the pitching lab.
He designed the splitter into a much harder version at 89-90 mph with just as good a depth as his old iteration of the pitch from his college and minor league days, and it’s playing great this spring. Mize has a 29 percent strikeout rate this spring as a result. The regular season is a different ball of wax, but any improvement in his strikeout rate can take Mize to frontline starter status, where he can legitimately compete with Flaherty and Olson for the title of second fiddle to Tarik Skubal.
The other pitch that got an overhaul in the offseason was a slider that has only occasionally been a weapon for him at the major league level. Mize is now throwing two distinct versions of a slider. One is a harder, cutterish look in the upper 80’s, while the other is an improved swing and miss edition in the mid-80’s with much better depth than he’s ever managed previously.
These are quite excellent developments, as Mize has already souped up his fourseam fastball. After sitting 93-94 mph early in his major league career, that pitch is pretty consistently 95-96 mph with elite extension and outstanding induced vertical break (IVB) marks. Essentially he’s got his release dialed in to produce maximum ride on the heater, and is racking up more whiffs and weak contact in the air as a result.
ZiPS, of course, isn’t taking any of that into account yet. Mize is projected to make 21 starts and throw 106 innings with a 4.33 ERA/4.34 FIP combination worth 1.0 fWAR. He has a long, consistent track record of low walks and better than average home run marks. If he can carry the better stuff into the season and collect a better rate of strikeouts, he’s going to blow those projections out of the water and he too will press Flaherty and Olson for the title of second best to Skubal’s top dog status.
Jackson Jobe
Mize looks like the Tigers’ ace in the hole, but top pitching prospect Jackson Jobe earned the fifth starter spot this spring, and he is potentially a true ace in the making.
The 22-year-old right-hander is still a little raw in the command department and has yet to top 100 innings, so we’ll have to see how well he holds up to major league demands this season. The stuff is undeniable, and since the middle of last season it’s been pretty clear that Jobe had little left to prove against minor league hitters. What he does still have to prove, is that he can command his lethal pitch mix enough to start piling up more strikeouts.
Jobe is a really good athlete and shows a ton of aptitude for tweaking and refining his pitch mix. His 95-100+ mph fourseam fastball has increased in good vertical movement over the past year, and that heater gives him a margin for error than his chief competition for the rotation, right-hander Keider Montero, can’t match despite similar quality breaking and offspeed stuff.
He backs that with an excellent split-changeup that he’ll use against any hitter in any count. Jobe actually looked to be actively avoiding falling back on the changeup this spring, focusing on developing his new power curve and revamped slider. Both pitches have premium spin rates, and the more 12-6 curve plays better off his high fourseam fastball that his old sweeper did. The sweeper is still present, but Jobe appears to be turning it into a more traditional slider with a little more depth and a little less horizontal sweep this offseason. He’s also mixing in a sinker now to give hitters a different fastball look, and his 90 mph cutter is really more of a power slider in its own right.
There’s no question he has the stuff, but the whiffs and strikeouts have still been a minor challenge for him. He still tends to get ahead of hitters and get a little too nibbly chasing the whiffs, letting them back into counts where his pitch selection is a little more predictable. There is work to be done here, and it’s at least possible that early struggles could see him sent back down to sharpen things up, but he’s here now and the task of proving he’s ready won’t be too much for the confident youngster.
ZiPS projects 25 starts and 101 1⁄3 innings with a 4.62 ERA/4.75 FIP. His hamstring injury and pedestrian strikeout and walk numbers at Double-A last year hurt his projections, and frankly the walk trouble last year was 90 percent to do with umpiring at that level in my view. He draws a 0.5 fWAR projection and as long as he’s healthy, will blow that out of the water.
Starting depth
This is actually the area that could really boost the Tigers this season. Keider Montero would be the fifth starter on at least half the teams in the league, and left-hander Brant Hurter acquitted himself very well in a bulk relief role last season. It’s yet to be determined if Hurter will begin the year starting in Toledo, or helping out as the Tigers second lefty in the major league bullpen, but Hurter has good command of his sinker-slider combination, and can really limit hard contact in the air. The Tigers are in good shape with the two of them as potential fill-ins, while prospect Ty Madden might be able to help as well when he returns from some shoulder inflammation this spring.
The real wild card here is veteran free agent signing Alex Cobb. He looks more like a problem than any help right now, as his return will force a tough decision at the backend of the rotation. However, his return also looks anything but imminent.
The 37-year-old right-hander was signed back in December for $15 million on a one-year deal. That doesn’t look too good considering the names that signed one-year contracts this offseason. Cobb was with the Guardians last year after undergoing surgery on his hip in October of 2023. He was barely able to get back on the mound as his recovery from hip labrum and impingement issues took much longer than expected. He ultimately threw just 16 1⁄3 innings and then made two postseason appearances.
This spring, Cobb received another injection to deal with ongoing inflammation in that hip, and has only recently begun throwing again. Despite the injury history, Cobb is predictably very solid when he is on the mound. Scott Harris had him in San Francisco in 2022-2023 and knows his man, so we’ll just hope there’s a plan to keep Cobb on the shelf and healing as long as possible. At his age there’s nearly always something wrong, so perhaps he’ll function as a stash, with the Tigers letting him work on his body as much as possible until a need arises. Still, if he’s healthy and recovered, the crunch in the starting rotation will become a bit of a problem to deal with. Too much pitching is of course, the best problem you can have in major league baseball, so there’s no reason to worry about it right now.
Finally, the Tigers have veteran starter Kenta Maeda in their bullpen, former pitching prospect Matt Manning in Toledo, and another good, hard-throwing pitching prospect in Troy Melton set to leap to Triple-A this season. Considering the Tigers’ creative approach to rotation vacancies last season, they probably won’t even opt for a regular starter if they get this far down the depth chart, but they’re clearly in great shape in terms of their ability to get bulk innings in the case of their top 7-8 options needing help.
Tigers vs. everyone
There are a few rotations around the league you can point to as clearly better than the Tigers group, at least on paper. The Los Angeles Dodgers, Seattle Mariners, and Atlanta Braves look like the cream of the crop to me. The Tigers are in a second tier with the San Diego Padres, Boston Red Sox, and the Philadelphia Phillies.
Within the AL Central division, you can argue for any of the Cleveland Guardians, Minnesota Twins, and Kansas City Royals, but none of them quite has a Skubal, and I don’t think the Twins and Royals really have the depth to hold up the way the Tigers do. The Guardians inevitably pitch well no matter how they look on paper, but their rotation is pretty modest at this point. I’ll take the Tigers to have the best rotation in the division. If either Mize or Jobe really puts it together, the Tigers will be up at top of the league once again.
The Tigers top three can match up with almost anyone, and few rosters have better starting depth. The rotation will be a huge key to their chances in 2025, and right now all systems are go.
