The Tigers agree Framber Valdez to a three-year, $115MM contract, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reports. The deal includes an exit after the second season, Passan added. According to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, there is a deferred payment. Jon Heyman of the New York Post reports that Valdez is getting a $20MM signing bonus.
Valdez also teams up with AJ Hinch and gives the Tigers a lethal 1-2 pairing at the top of the rotation. You will go in the back Tarik Skubal over a starting staff that looks like one of the best in the American League. They will be followed Reese Olson, Jack Flaherty again Casey Mize if everyone goes through the camp healthy. That will push the KBO signal Drew Anderson in the swing role, and the second year is fine Troy Melton he can come out of the bullpen or wait in Triple-A for a rotation spot to open up.
The Skubal-Valdez pairing may only be together for one more season, as the two-time Cy Young winner is a year away from what should be a record-setting free agent contract. Skubal and the club went to court this morning to determine whether he made $19MM or $32MM in his final year under club control. The arbitrators won’t reveal their decision until tomorrow, and Chris McCosky of The Detroit News confirms that neither the Tigers’ nor Skubal’s camp know which way they will rule. The download of Valdez is an independent decision.
It’s the kind of strikeout that many Detroit fans have been waiting for all season. The Tigers had the trade deadline, and their biggest move before tonight was keeping Flaherty on the $20MM player option again. Gleyber Torres with a qualifying offering of $22.025MM. They came back with a setup man Kyle Finnegan on a two-year contract and added Anderson and closer Kenley Jansen on one-year contracts. They did an excellent job of building depth but without pushing the chips on an impact player in what could be Skubal’s final season in the Motor City.
Valdez brings a ceiling that Detroit’s other acquisitions have lacked. He is a two-time All-Star who has finished in the top 10 in Cy Young voting in three of the past four seasons. Valdez worked his way from an unsigned amateur to the big leagues in 2018. He spent his first two seasons working in the pitching staff for the Astros club then owned by Hinch. Valdez was traded permanently during the season-shortened 2020 campaign and has been one of the best pitchers in MLB over the past six years.
The southpaw has posted an earned run average below 4.00 in each season since becoming a full-time starter. He has also been on the injured list twice in his MLB career. He broke his left ring finger when he was hit by a returner in Spring Training 2021. He had returned from that injury at the end of May. His other IL success was missing two weeks due to elbow inflammation in early ’24. He returned without issue and ended up starting 29 games between the regular season and the playoffs.
Valdez has 14 starts and ranks fifth with 973 innings pitched as of 2020. He has a combined ERA of 3.23 in that span. That includes showings below 3.00 in 2022 and ’24. Valdez was among MLB’s best starting pitchers — at least until the second half of his walk year. He posted an earned run average between 2.82 and 3.45 per season between 2021-24. He has averaged 175 innings over the last three years.
For the first half of last season, Valdez was on a similar pace. He carried a 2.75 ERA over 121 frames at the All-Star Break. Valdez came off the break with two more quality starts and was sitting at a 2.62 ERA (top 10 among qualifiers) as August arrived. He chose the difficult period of the worst few months of his career to close his year of travel. Valdez has a 6.05 ERA with a 17.7% strikeout rate over his last 10 starts. His pitching speed slowed, and opponents shut him down in August and September. There is no indication that he was complacent, and it seems that the matter was not played well.
Valdez again found himself in the middle of controversy when he started against the Yankees on September 2. Two pitches after giving up a grand slam Trent Grishamhit the machine César Salazar chest with a 93 MPH sinker on the crossbar. Salazar was expecting a fastball and didn’t have time to react to the fastball. Valdez did not check the catch at that time. Salazar was unhurt and finished the game without a problem.
The thrower denied that the collision was intentional. Salazar did his best to downplay the incident, saying he pressed the wrong button on his PitchCom. Even so, it seems the pitcher doesn’t care about the mound made for poor optics. Valdez said after the game that he apologized to Salazar.
Did that affect his market value? It’s impossible to know from the outside, though one imagines other teams have asked Valdez about the incident during the free agent process. It’s worth noting that the team in Detroit owned by his former manager was the one that ended up signing him, so it looks like they have no concerns about his fitness or clubhouse presence.
The postseason dip in production and Valdez’s age are likely major factors in his extended free agent stay. He finished the year with a 3.66 ERA in 192 innings. His 23.3% strikeout rate and 8.5% walk percentage were in line with his career marks. Solid hitting and walk profile, but his game has always been built around ground balls. He has a career low 62% strikeout rate and kept the ball down at a 58.6% clip last season, the third highest mark among pitchers with 100+ innings.
It is not a difficult way that people like Dylan Cease brought to the table this offseason, even though Valdez’s statistical profile isn’t quite the same Fried Max. Both are ground ball specialists who sit in the mid-90s with a sinker who leads the profile. Fried inked an eight-year, $218MM contract last winter. The biggest difference is that it came before his age-31 season, while Valdez turned 32 in November.
While a one-year gap may not seem like much, teams have been reluctant to make long-term commitments to 32-year-old free agent forwards. Zack Greinke, Jacob deGrom again Blake Snell they are the only pitchers of age or older to manage five or more years as of 2011. All will have at least one Cy Young on their resumes by then. Valdez’s no-trade took a six-year contract off the table. MLBTR projected a five-year, $150MM deal at the start of the offseason. The fact that he remained unsigned in February made it clear that a five-year contract would not be on the table.
On the face of it, Valdez looks to have done well even though he signed a week before Spring Training. The true value of the deal cannot really be known until the extent of the reversal is reported, however. The sticker price comes with a whopping $38.33MM annual total that would rank 10th all-time. The net present value will be reduced to at least some extent by the discounted cash flow.
Aside from the contract split, this goes down easily as free agent Scott Harris moves through his four-year career in baseball. It’s Detroit’s first nine-figure investment since handicapping Javier Baez deal, which was signed under former GM Al Avila. Harris’ front office did not exceed $35MM in free agency. That was their two-year contract to re-sign Flaherty almost a year ago. There are some similarities with Valdez in terms of waiting out the market for a quality starter late in the season, but this is clearly a more valuable investment.
More to come.
