The Detroit Tigers Have a Pitching Problem

Detroit Tigers Pitching Development is Lagging

The Detroit Tigers stopped hitting in September. And they didn’t hit particularly well in the playoffs, either. Tigers President Scott Harris made the flagging bats one of his main talking points during his end-of-season press conference.

It is important to figure out why those hitters slumped. But offense shouldn’t be a big problem for the team in the near future. Close to 70% of the team’s run production in 2025 came from players age 27 or younger, all of whom are under team control for at least three more years. And the lineup may soon be bolstered by some of the best position prospects in baseball.

But pitching is another story.

That might feel a little counterintuitive to fans. This is the same organization that saw big contributions from unheralded rookie pitchers like Brant Hurter, Keider Montero, Brenan Hanifee, and Sean Guenther in 2024. And it’s the same organization that began 2025 with the top pitching prospect in baseball, and ended the season with a different rookie looking like one of the team’s best pitchers.

But the well has run dry. And Chris Fetter and company can only do so much magic.

The Tigers Pitching Gap

Tarik Skubal’s impending departure is already one of baseball’s biggest offseason storylines. But the Tigers are also looking at losing Jack Flaherty and Casey Mize after the 2026 season. That trio accounted for 80 starts and 505.1 innings pitched in 2025, as well as another 7 starts and 35+ innings in the postseason.

Right now the Tigers are not equipped to replace those arms from within the system. Troy Melton, Reese Olson, and Jackson Jobe give Detroit a talented young foundation for the future. But there are few promising arms behind them.

Simply put, the Detroit Tigers are not getting the most out of their pitching prospects right now. Their development issues are varied, but at the very least the organization needs to reassess how it handles injury prevention, velocity growth, and player acquisition.

The Tigers aren’t quite to a crisis point yet, but that time is rapidly approaching. So let’s take a look at what’s going wrong.

Injuries

Pitching is bad for you, and injuries are a part of the job. Sometimes teams luck out and everyone stays healthy for a year. But sometimes the opposite happens, and seemingly everyone gets hurt. 

That’s what happened in 2025. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of young Tigers pitchers and prospects who missed significant time with injury this year: Wilmer Flores, Owen Hall, Jaden Hamm, Jackson Jobe, Ty Madden, Carlos Marcano, Michael Massey, Jake Miller, Joseph Montalvo, Reese Olson, Yosber Sanchez, Ethan Schiefelbein, Eric Silva, Dylan Smith, and Paul Wilson.

Again, sometimes pitching injuries are just bad luck. But Detroit’s 13 Tommy John surgeries since the start of the 2023 season are the third most in baseball over that time. And it’s not just arm injures. We’ve seen injured backs, cores, groins, hips, and knees, among other ailments.

Perhaps the most alarming part of this is that the Tigers have instituted policies designed to prevent injuries. These include standard innings limits, but also strict pitches-per-inning limits. Most minor-leaguers in the system are done for the day if they throw 30 pitches in any one inning.

Early in the season they keep starters to four innings per outing. Relievers have a limited number of times they can get up and get warm, whether they enter the game or not. And they aren’t allowed to pitch on back-to-back days.

But it sure doesn’t seem like any of those guardrails are preventing injuries. It’s probably time to reassess the process.

Not So Fast

Maybe all those injuries would make more sense if the Tigers were overflowing with hard-throwing pitchers. But they aren’t.

There were 140 minor-leaguers who touched triple digits in 2025, but only three of them were in Detroit’s system: Marco Jimenez, Moises Rodriguez, and Yosber Sanchez. They also had just two big-league pitchers touch 100 (Carlos Hernandez, Tarik Skubal).

Throwing hard doesn’t guarantee success, but it sure helps. Detroit’s Triple-A pitchers ranked 20th out of 30 teams in average four-seam velocity, while their Low-A pitchers ranked 5th out of 10 teams in the Florida State League.

But beyond the lack of pure velocity, there were also some alarming velo dips in 2025.

Jaden Hamm was a breakout pitching prospect in 2024, to the point he briefly appeared on some mid-season top-100 prospect lists. He was never a fireballer, but he would touch 95 MPH or higher on occasion. He spent most of 2025 with a fastball that rarely topped 92.

Rayner Castillo was another 2024 breakout, with a four-seamer that averaged almost 96 MPH and a slider with a 42% whiff rate. This year he sat at 93-94 MPH, while his slider seemingly lost its sharpness. And whispers from the backfields had Ethan Schiefelbein living in the mid-80s.

The Right Stuff?

It’s possible the Tigers simply value strike-throwing and overall stuff more than pure velocity. The strikes definitely seem to be there:

That’s excellent. But the stuff still seems to be lacking. Baseball America ranked the top 150 minor leaguers by Stuff+ in 2025, and the Tigers had just two players on the list: Troy Melton, and 28-year-old minor-league veteran Troy Watson.

Stuff models certainly aren’t everything that matters when it comes to pitching, and the Tigers probably have an internal model they prefer. It’s also possible they didn’t have more names on the Stuff+ leaderboard because they were all hurt. Or, maybe they need to change the kind of pitcher they target.

Acquired Taste

Plenty has been written about the pitchers Detroit has signed in free agency or acquired in trades during Scott Harris’ tenure as team president. It’s a mixed bag, at best, and another area the organization definitely needs to reassess. But what we want to focus on here is the draft.

The Tigers have dramatically altered their draft strategy since Mark Conner took over as scouting director. Under Al Avila and Scott Pleis the Tigers took almost exclusively college players from big conferences. Under Conner they have been possibly the most aggressive team in baseball when it comes to drafting high-school and JuCo talent.

The results have been pretty spectacular when it comes to position players. But the arms leave a lot to be desired. The Tigers have drafted ten high-school pitchers in the last three years. Most of them have been exciting arm talents, but the early returns are discouraging:

This isn’t a huge surprise. High-school pitchers offer a lot of upside, but they are famously risky. Meanwhile, Detroit’s college and JuCo picks from these same drafts have been pretty solid. A few have pitched very well, in fact, while others were good enough to be used as trade chips earlier this season. Maybe it’s time to shift away from those boom-or-bust prep arms a little.

Positive Developments

So we have some concerns about the future of pitching in the Detroit Tigers system. But we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the handful of positive pitching developments in 2025.

Lefty Andrew Sears turned himself into possibly the best pitching prospect in the system. He threw harder, increased his workload by 20 innings, cut his walk rate in half, and maintained his strong strikeout rate while climbing to Double-A. His ultimate role is still to be determined, but he looks like a surefire big leaguer.

JuCo righty Lucas Elissalt got off to a slow start in 2025, allowing 13 earned runs in his first 14.1 innings. Then he went on an epic run, giving up just five earned runs over his next 51 frames. He ran into a little trouble after his late-season promotion to High-A West Michigan, but Elissalt looks very promising — if he can just add a little more velocity.

And no one raised his profile quite like burly righty Kelvis Salcedo. The 19-year-old dominated Florida Complex League competition, and then he looked even better after his promotion to Low-A. Opposing hitters batted a comically low .133 against him, and he showed three pitches with the potential to be above-average or better.

Kelvis Salcedo is 19 and only in Low-A, but he *might* be the best pitching prospect in the Tigers system.

He faced 10 batters today. Threw 41 pitches, 31 for strikes. Allowed an infield hit and struck out 6, with 10 whiffs. pic.twitter.com/iAdusVebNy

— Tigers ML Report (@tigersMLreport) September 7, 2025

There are a few other names worth mentioning, including Jhonan Coba, Preston Howey, Wuilberth Mendez, Moises Rodriguez, and departed 2024 draftees Micah Ashman and R.J. Sales. And the 2025 draft class looks intriguing. Malachi Witherspoon has the sort of electric stuff the org has been missing, if he can harness it. Cale Wetwiska looked very intriguing in a limited pro sample. And lefties Ben Jacobs, Caleb Leys, and Grayson Grinsell should at least add some solid depth.

Time To Self Scout

We watch a lot of minor league baseball. Obviously our focus is on the Detroit Tigers and their farm system. But in watching them we see a lot of talent in other organizations, often at multiple levels.

Take the Mets, for example. We got to see their Low-A affiliate in St. Lucie trot out five different pitchers who throw 99 MPH or harder. And we saw them graduate three very promising young arms to the big leagues. Yet they still had enough pitching talent left in Double-A to take down Erie in the Eastern League Championship Series.

And it’s a similar story with Boston, Cleveland, Cincinnati, the Yankees, and even Pittsburgh and Miami. There’s no debating the Detroit Tigers farm system had an excellent year in 2025. But many other organizations seem to have better pitching development plans in place.

These things are cyclical. Teams can’t graduate five elite pitching prospects to the majors each season. And maybe the Tigers truly were just horrendously unlucky in 2025. Maybe next year their small army of injured arms will all return and dominate, and our concerns will look silly.

But the time to find out is right now.

The Detroit Tigers need to make certain they have the right processes in place. Because by this time next year it will be far too late.