Framber Valdez gave the Comerica Park crowd exactly what they came to see on home opener day, working six scoreless innings against the St. Louis Cardinals as the Tigers won 4-0 to improve to 3-4 on the season. It was his second consecutive quality start, and the performance carried the same fingerprints as his first: durable, sinker-heavy, and capable of managing traffic without unraveling.
The sinker was the story again, thrown 51 percent of the time and sitting 94-95 mph through the first four innings before settling to 92.4 in the sixth. The curveball was his sharpest secondary, generating two of his five strikeouts with spin up 75 rpm from year-prior at 2,921 rpm. Valdez worked through 17 batted ball events but allowed just 3 hits and 2 walks, the Cardinals never threatened to get anything going against him.
“His ability to spin the ball, his ability to find his changeup today, even take a little bit off as the innings, piled up. The quality of his stuff, he’s hard to hit. Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. You know, we faced him in some big moments, and I’ve seen him on the biggest stage ,and he never backs down from the competition. And I value that a lot in,deciding how long to let him go or when to how push him because he’s usually just a ground ball away from escaping just about anything. And so if we can keep him in the strike zone like he is right now, he’s really hard to deal with”
Through two starts Valdez owns a 0.75 ERA in 12 innings of work. For a Tigers rotation that needed a reliable second arm behind Skubal, the early returns on the Valdez signing could not look much better with just one earned run over 12 innings of work.
Jerry McKennan 
Chris Brown