The Detroit Tigers, undeniably, need pitching help. Their starting rotation is Tarik Skubal and then a cluster of arms you can probably call better than average as a group, but each comes with distinct question marks. Reese Olson can’t stay healthy, Casey Mize regressed heavily after the All-Star Break, Jack Flaherty pulled a Jekyll and Hyde routine down the stretch, and Troy Melton has 45 major league innings. Keider Montero and Brant Hurter are solid 6th starters, but neither project as a replacement
you’re that confident in if something goes wrong with the main group.
Of course, the bullpen projects as even worse. Will Vest is great, Tyler Holton is fine, and then there’s everyone else. The simplest move would be to address the bullpen by addressing the bullpen. Sign Devin Williams or Ryan Helsley to pair with Vest, get an interesting middle reliever or two for $5M, et voila. New bullpen, new team.
That being said, there’s more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. If the Tigers wanted to improve their rotation depth, both now and for the next few seasons, and beef up the bullpen at the same time, they could sign a good starting pitcher and move Melton back to the setup role he inherited down the stretch. It’s unconventional, but it could work. They just need the right starter to make things happen.
When looking for candidates, there’s a pretty specific set of criteria to sort through. The pitcher has to be clearly better than Melton, or at least far more proven, to make this work, otherwise there’s no real point. They also need to be cheap enough that Detroit can realistically afford them; as good as Dylan Cease may be, they probably won’t be spending $150-200M on anyone, let alone a pitcher with an ERA of 4.55 in 2025.
Outside of the couple short-term arms we discussed recently, the main candidate I see is Ranger Suárez. Suárez joined the Philadelphia Phillies rotation full-time in 2022 and has excelled since. Over the last four years, the 30-year-old southpaw has quietly been a top-30 or so pitcher in baseball. 59 starters have tossed at least 500 innings since 2022, and Suárez stacks up favorably. Among that group, his ERA ranks 22nd, while his FIP and fWAR are 17th. Results wise, Suárez has been very good. There are a few flies in the ointment, though, that do need mentioning.
To begin with, his strikeout and walk rates are almost perfectly aligned with league average. That isn’t inherently bad, but it does mean a lot of his excellence is in the form of soft contact, ground balls, home run suppression, and the like. The good news is he’s skilled at making it work, and even brings some of the best fielding at his position to the mix. It’s just a narrower tightrope to walk than for a pitcher who piles up the strikeouts. Those stats are all in the top-20, and are pretty consistent from year to year. It also doesn’t hurt that Suárez is a lefty, giving the Tigers a southpaw in the rotation beyond Tarik Skubal’s expected departure.
Some teams won’t trust that profile, but that’s probably their loss. Suárez throws a varied 5 pitch mix, mostly relying on a sinker, changeup, and curveballs to get weak contact and grounders, so when the command is on, he’s pretty unhittable. It’s a well composed mix with good deception, making him tough to square up. He doesn’t walk many hitters, relying on that command to allow him to pound the strike zone without making many big mistakes, and that emphasis on soft contact and quick outs lets him eat innings. Suárez has averaged over 5.6 innings per start, though he does tend to miss half a dozen starts per season. Recently that’s been in the form of lower back stiffness, which isn’t great, but those issues haven’t slowed him down much at all.
Suárez posted a 3.20 ERA with a 3.21 FIP in 2025 across 157 1/3 innings, good for 4.0 fWAR. While those are the best marks he’s put up since 2021 and not likely to carry over entirely into 2026, he’s a very good bet to remain a 3 WAR pitcher for several years to come. He doesn’t depend on velocity, and command tends to hold up well into a starting pitcher’s early 30’s.
If you’re of the opinion that a pitcher’s job is to get outs, and you don’t really care how, Suárez might be the guy for you. He does that and he does it well. If you want an overpowering ace at the top of your rotation, or at least an arm who could cosplay as that on a good day, there’s probably several other free agents you’d rather have on your roster instead.
Current contract projections for him suggest something like 5 years and $110M-130M, which may be outside of Detroit’s range for a good but not great starting pitcher. I’d argue it shouldn’t be, but that’s a different issue. Working under Detroit’s expected constraints, their best bet at getting impact talent is probably waiting out good free agents whose markets never fully develop. Suárez will probably have quite a bit of interest from multiple teams, so a really bargain lower than those projections doesn’t seem very likely.
Thanks to his unique profile and track record, and the fact Philly is likely to prioritize bringing back Kyle Schwarber and JT Realmuto, Suárez is one of the better candidates to slip through the cracks. Think of Carlos Correa signing with the Minnesota Twins and you get the idea we’re going for here. There were enough other options for teams looking for a high-end shortstop that year that Correa was left without the huge deal he was looking for and ended up signing on with the Twins instead on a one-year deal. Detroit could be the beneficiary by nabbing a strong starting pitcher on a shorter deal, probably with opt-outs and incentives, if a few other teams play it a tad too safe, or are caught up chasing other names.
