You’ve heard it said before. He’ll be different with us. We can fix him.
Former Red Sox top prospect, White Sock, and Dodger, the artist known as Michael Kopech remains one of the great project pitchers of our time. There are always a few guys like this around. Blessed with great stuff but unable to put together the health and the command to really take advantage of their strengths. Garrett Richards, Nick Pivetta…Zach Wheeler was once this sort of guy. Hard-throwers with nasty breaking stuff who continue
to break hearts and disappoint fanbases for years. Sometimes, as with Wheeler and to a lesser degree Pivetta, it eventually gels and they become much more consistent major league pitchers. Or like Richards, one or two good seasons are followed by nearly a decade of struggle before the player finally hangs up his spikes for good.
The Tigers have been vaguely linked to free agent starting pitcher Lucas Giolito, with some rumor that the high school teammate of Jack Flaherty might find a comfortable home in Detroit. Lefty swingman Nick Martinez has been mentioned. Justin Verlander is still available, but likes things quiet and is rarely a big subject of rumors until a deal is about to happen. Maybe he’d be best served preparing on his own and waiting until a contender needs him in March when injuries crop up. Zac Gallen and Chris Bassitt are still out there as potentially solid inning eater type arms. However, even if they’re hunting for another arm, it seems likely the Tigers would like to wait another week or so for Tarik Skubal’s final number before they decide to add another pitcher.
But while attention is focused more on a starter, and Kopech hasn’t been a starter since 2023, I just want to personally beg the Tigers to take a flier on the mercurial, oft-injured, hard-throwing right-hander. The Tigers have four main ingredients that could help any pitcher. Pitching coaches Chris Fetter and biomechanics specialist and assistant pitching coach, Robin Lund, catcher Dillon Dingler behind the plate, and a reasoably good park for a fly ball pitcher to thrive in.
Kopech history
Of course, Kopech has been on some well coached teams. Ethan Katz of the White Sox seems fairly good, and Kopech spent 2024 and an injury plagued, 11 inning campaign in 2025, with the Los Angeles Dodgers. So we can’t expect miracles, but Kopech has enough potential to recapture his former form that I would love to see the Tigers coaching staff get a crack at him. There are signs that he and the Dodgers were on the right track until a knee injury ended his 2025 season.
Kopech is not going to get a particularly large sum of money. He’s barely drawn any attention in free agent chatter this offseason. So we’re just talking about taking a fun flier where the Tigers get a chance to work with Kopech in the spring and early in the season, and they just see how it goes.
Michael Kopech was the 33rd overall pick out of Mount Pleasant High School in northeast Texas way back in 2014. He quickly emerged as one of the better pitching prospects in baseball, blowing people’s minds with a 105 mph fastball in High-A ball and consistently sitting triple digits as a starter by 2016. That same year the Red Sox dealt him to the White Sox in a hugely consequential deal for Chris Sale.
Things did not work out for the White Sox. As he so often has, Dave Dombrowski won that deal handily. Sale thrived, while Kopech briefly debuted in 2018, then had UCL reconstruction surgery in 2019 and wasn’t back on the mound until 2021. Two mediocre years in a starting role followed, along with nagging injuries, until the White Sox finally dealt him to the Dodgers. There he converted to relief in 2024-2025 and has been reasonably effective in that role.
Of course, a meniscus tear in his right knee caused Kopech to miss most of the 2025 season, so it’s not as though things magically turned around with the Dodgers. However, with the usual monstrous caveat, “if he’s healthy,” Kopech is a quality reliever who has the odd bout of wildness but can also overpower the best hitters in the game when he’s on. And he can do that almost entirely based off his fourseamer alone.
Of course it’s also possible that he’s wild, injured, walks the world, and has to be released. There’s a reason he’s likely to be fairly cheap as a free agent.
Kopech’s upside
Kopech still has the power stuff. As a reliever he’s basically fastballs all the time. Over the past two seasons he’s been 81 percent fastballs with an average velo of 98 mph and a slightly above average induced vertical break mark. He also retains his above average extension. Unfortunately he also retains a long arm path and a pretty high effort delivery that will sometimes get off balance as well. Even as a prospect the relief risk was always a part of Kopech’s scouting reports, as his delivery never screamed consistent strike thrower.
Still, while he’s struggled with his breaking stuff and become almost pretty one dimensional as a reliever, that fastball is so good that he has a 3.32 ERA through 78 2/3 innings of relief work, though his 4.09 FIP speaks to the high walk rate as well. Kopech is punching out 30.1 percent of hitters despite the fact that everyone in the stadium and watching at home knows what’s coming 80 percent of the time.
Kopech has also made some moves toward recapturing the higher arm angle he had earlier in his career in the time with the Dodgers. That arm angle had dropped some after Tommy John when he was still trying to hold up to a starting workload. It reached it’s low in 2023, and with the Dodgers has been moving back up. That seems like the right move for him considering his riding fourseam shape, and may indicate that at least his arm is healthier than he was following TJ.
As a starter, Kopech’s fastball command was occasionally a problem, but his bigger issues came from wildly inconsistent breaking and offspeed stuff. In longer outings, he couldn’t just relying on blowing most hitters away, and that’s when he got into trouble. Kopech’s slider was good but erratic and he had a distinct tendency to hang it in a bad spot. In 2023 he started tinkering with a cutter, and it’s become a bigger part of his repertoire over the past two years, replacing the breaking balls. He only threw 11 innings in 2025, but he ditched the slider entirely, using the 91.1 mph cutter instead. It’s pretty close to a turbo slider not dropping that much but with some gloveside cut. It’s a nasty pitch, and more to the point, Kopech may have a lot easier time locating it that with his old slider, which required him to really rip through and spin the baseball.
The case for signing Kopech
The idea is pretty simple. The best pure arm talent still available in free agency is Michael Kopech. The power stuff in relief is pretty hard to argue with here. The questions with Kopech are all about his command and his health, but when he’s healthy he’s remained an effective pitcher who balances out the high walk rate with a lot of strikeouts based on raw stuff alone. This despite a whole litany of mostly minor injuries in the years since he returned from Tommy Johnn surgery.
If the Tigers can do even a little bit to help him refine the arm slot adjustment and the new cutter he’s worked on, they’ll have a top 30 reliever here. The dream of converting him back to starting is probably dead, but the continued excellence in his fastball and the developments he’s been working on with the Dodgers could make him a minor steal for the Tigers and a nice reinforcement for the bullpen.
Yes, the Tigers should probably go out and add the best starter they can if they aren’t comfortable with their rotation depth. Kopech can’t come at the expense of signing another starter if that’s their plan. And yes, adding both Kopech and a Lucas Giolito level starter would require opening two more spots on the 40-man roster. That can be arranged without too much difficulty to bolster the pitching staff.
All bets are off if Kopech ends up getting a flurry of good offers and ends up getting a big enough deal that it would get in the way of the Tigers adding a starter. The Giants have been rumored as interested in recent weeks, but nothing has come of it yet, and beyond that the Kopech news has been light. If the Tigers could snatch him up right now for $5-6 million with a 2027 team option, I would love it.
No argument it’s a volatile profile, but the upside is worth a minor risk for the Tigers. If he’s banged up in 2026? Well he isn’t hurting anything and he won’t cost as much as Alex Cobb. Without access to his medicals, it’s impossible to insist that this is a good idea. Maybe he’s got too much wear and tear in his shoulder, elbow, and knee. The optimistic view is that maybe the things he’s been working on come together and he’s pitching the eighth and ninth inning by midseason, lengthening the bullpen and giving A.J. Hinch even more flexibility.
The Tigers were unwilling to go out on a limb to sign a major free agent this offseason. Perhaps they’ll still go get themselves a mid-rotation starter once Tarik Skubal’s arbitration hearing clarifies their 2026 payroll. Who knows, maybe they’ll blow our minds by signing Eugenio Suarez to play third. Yes I’m kidding. But taking a smaller swing with this kind of upside is a plus and an aggressive, smaller scale move would be welcome either way. In Kopech’s case the potential reward is worth the risk and we’d love to see the Tigers staff get a crack at tuning him up a bit more.
