Ken Rosenthal reported on Friday evening that the Detroit Tigers and right-handed pitcher Drew Anderson on in agreement on a one-year deal with a club option, pending his physical. Anderson has spent the last four years pitching in Japan and then Korea. He posted a 2.25 ERA across 30 starts in 2025, pitching for the SSG Landers, the club formerly known as the SK Wyverns. He is expected to work as a starter for the Tigers, but we’ll see how that actually plays out.
The 31-year-old has a prototypical
starter’s build at six-foot-three and 205 pounds. He was drafted back in 2021 in the 21st round by the Philadelphia Phillies as a prep pick out of Galena High School in Nevada.
Anderson’s initial progress as a prospect was slow, but he was consistently effective and durable until an injury plagued 2019 campaign in which he made a brief major league debut for the Phillies. He was with the Chicago White Sox briefly in 2020, and threw 22 innings for the Texas Rangers in 2021 before spending 2022-2023 with the Hiroshima Carp in the NPB. The Tigers signed him in 2024 and he worked briefly as a reliever for the Toledo Mud Hens before he was released. He then signed a $1.2 million contract with the Landers for the rest of the 2024 season and then sticking there in 2025 where he finally appeared to put it all together in terms of his command.
When last we saw him in 2024, Anderson was mainly throwing his fourseam fastball, with a slider, curveball, and changeup in a pretty standard repertoire. The fourseamer averaged 95.5 mph at the time, topping out at 97.8 mph with slightly above average vertical movement and average extension.
His slider is typically 86-87 mph with almost zero vertical break, making it a prototypical gyro style slider with spin rates between 2600-2700 rpms. Spin rate doesn’t necessarily matter than much with this type of slider, but it does benefit his curveball somewhat. The curve is typically in the high 70’s and more of a strike stealer than anything. The breaking balls and changeup were all solid pitches during his brief time in the Tigers’ organization but he wasn’t spotting his fastball well enough to help them play to their best advantage. We’ll have to see if he has a new wrinkle up his sleeve or whether getting his command sorted out encouraged the club to bring him back. His fastball is the real attraction, though it’s more good than great.
Anderson struck out a whopping 35.3 percent of hitters faced last year with a good 7.3 percent walk rate, while limiting home runs pretty well. This is likely an effective way to add starting depth without spending some of the crazy money getting thrown at backend starters in recent seasons, but Anderson can’t be optioned so the Tigers will need to be right on this one. We’ll have to wait to hear the full terms, but plucking up pitchers who have gone over to Japan or Korea and improved dramatically has been an ongoing theme that past few years.
