Tigers Pitching Twins

The Detroit Tigers made perhaps the biggest surprise signing of the offseason when they locked up Framber Valdez to a 3/$115M contract. In the top tier of of free agent starting pitchers, he’s added some big time talent and helped to improve the depth at the position. As I typically do with any new addition, I went to take a look at his stuff. To my surprise, it looked extremely familiar.

As Rog had posted here, Framber’s stuff very closely matches what we saw from Keider Montero. Spin rates, velocity, movement. All of it is very similar. Even average arm angle. The largest difference: pitching arm.

All the talk about Keider Montero got @OPSenheimer thinking and look how much him and Framber Valdez have in common.

Having another teammate, who speaks the same language as you, all that can do is help.

All the credit to Jerry on this brilliant piece of data. pic.twitter.com/ZlwtKikEyv

— Rogelio Castillo (@rogcastbaseball) February 5, 2026

Let’s dig in a little deeper into this.

Location side-by-side

First, let’s look at locations for these pitches. Baseball savant does a terrific job with displaying this, but this will show them side-by-side.

A lot of these look like mirrors of each other to me. There are some differences like Keider keeping his curveball up a slight bit more than Framber. He also keeps his changeup more, which might explain the lower Whiff%.  But that hasn’t hurt Keider as he allowed a .174 BA and .370 SLG vs .223 BA and .420 SLG for Framber.

Usage splits

Again, we can see a mirror for some of them. Changeups they threw much more often to opposite side hitters, curveballs were close but leaned more towards same side, sliders more same side.

What I find interesting is how much more often Keider uses his 4-Seam fastball compared to his sinker. It might make sense to have him use it more vs lefties as a pitch that looks like it’s coming at them and then coming back over the plate. He could keep it in the same location even. When talking with Rog, he also wondered if it would be better for Keider if he threw his 4S higher in the zone. He averaged 16.0” of IVB during the regular season, which isn’t great higher in the zone. However — in the postseason he was averaging 17.7” would. While I’m sure some of that was him coming in relief and adrenaline from it being the post season, I do also think some of it was his grip on the ball.

Conclusion

My typical pieces involve some sort of analysis as to why I think a player will succeed or not. In this case, this was fascinating to see how similar these two pitchers were last year and it can help to understand the reason why there is hype behind Keider. While one is a righty and the other a southpaw, I hope Keider can, and does, chat with Framber to pick his brain as to why he uses the pitch selection he does given the similarities in their shapes. And maybe we could see the big Keider breakout we’ve hoped to see.