DETROIT – It’s probably the biggest question left for the Detroit Tigers ahead of Opening Day.
Who will be the No. 5 starter?
On paper, it’s actually a four-man race for the final two spots. But it feels like Jackson Jobe is closer to a lock than a demotion, which means he would join Tarik Skubal, Jack Flaherty, and Reese Olson.
Between the decision to call up Jobe late last season, the draft pick incentives that come with putting him on the Opening Day roster, and his performance so far this spring, I think Jobe’s spot is pretty safe.
The other member of this competition is Keider Montero, but he’s not on the same level as Kenta Maeda and Casey Mize. Yes, Montero had some nice moments during his rookie season, but he’s got minor league options and could benefit from starting the year in Toledo.
That leaves Maeda and Mize as the two most likely candidates to round out the rotation, at least while Alex Cobb is on the injured list.
Kenta Maeda’s spring
- Feb. 22 vs. Phillies: 2 innings, 4 strikeouts.
- Feb. 27 vs. Red Sox: 3 innings, 5 hits, 3 earned runs, 1 homer, 5 strikeouts.
- March 4 vs. Rays: 3.2 innings, 1 hit, 1 walk, 5 strikeouts.
- Overall spring stats: 8.2 innings, 6 hits, 1 walk, 3 earned runs, 1 homer, 14 strikeouts.
There are plenty of reasons to be encouraged by Maeda’s first three outings, but let’s start with the raw numbers.
Maeda started the Feb. 22 and March 4 games and came in for the third inning of the Feb. 27 game after Flaherty pitched the first two. In total, he’s put in almost one full game’s worth of work, and the production has been fantastic.
It’s a 3.12 ERA, 0.81 WHIP, and 14.5 strikeouts per nine. Notably, most of Maeda’s innings have come against legitimate major-league hitters.
But what’s most encouraging is the return of Maeda’s overpowering secondary pitches.
When he showed up to Lakeland last season, Maeda was topping out at about 88 mph with his fastball. He downplayed it because he’s an established veteran who knows how to prepare for a season, but the velocity never really returned.
So it’s great to see him up around 92 mph this spring -- and yes, that is a massive difference.
Maeda needs to be in the low 90s to make his splitter and slider play up. Since he started throwing a splitter in 2018, Maeda’s whiff rate with the pitch has hovered between 35-45%. Last season, it dropped to 30.3%.
So far this spring, that pitch is missing bats once again. Maeda got three whiffs on five swings against the splitter in his first start and four whiffs in six swings his second start.
Statcast data wasn’t available for his outing against the Rays, but he had five strikeouts. Maeda overpowered Yandy Diaz, who rarely swings and misses, with a slider and blew a fastball past Junior Caminero for another strikeout. Those are two of the best bats in the Tampa Bay lineup.
Maeda generated 14 whiffs in his first two outings and several more on Tuesday. If he can maintain a fastball velocity in the low 90s, it’s clear Maeda can still befuddle MLB hitters with his splitter and slider.
Casey Mize’s spring
- Feb. 23 vs. Yankees: 2 innings, 2 hits, 3 strikeouts.
- March 1 vs. Phillies: 3 innings, 1 walk, 2 strikeouts.
- Overall spring stats: 5 innings, 2 hits, 0 runs, 0 walks, 0 homers, 5 strikeouts.
It’s hard to beat five shutout innings. I didn’t think Mize had much of a chance to crack the starting rotation heading into spring training, but he’s making a strong case so far.
It’s still just five innings, though.
Mize has always been a tough pitcher to evaluate at the major-league level because he’s never rediscovered the dominance that led to strong strikeout rates in the minors.
But as he cruised through these first two outings, Mize got a total of nine swings and misses on 68 pitches -- a very solid 13.2% swinging strike rate.
Mize doesn’t necessarily have to be an elite bat misser to succeed at the MLB level. He does two things extraordinarily well: throw strikes and keep the ball on the ground.
Last year did not go well for Mize, but he still managed to rank in the 75th percentile of MLB pitchers with a 6.4% walk rate. He ranked in the 83rd percentile with a 49.6% ground ball rate.
If he’s not going to miss bats, then that has to be the formula for Mize.
In his most successful MLB season (2021), Mize didn’t miss bats or induce much weak contact. But he still finished with a 3.71 ERA and 1.14 WHIP because he threw strikes and kept the ball on the ground.
In his start against the Phillies, Mize induced three grounders, two weak fly balls, a popup, and one 102 mph fly ball that traveled 414 feet for an out.
Five of those seven balls in play had an expected batting average of .120 of worse. That means based on their exit velocity and launch angle, they will turn into outs at least nine times out of 10.
Only that long fly ball from Rodolfo Castro threatened to cause any real damage.
Mize wasn’t nearly as effective at limiting hard contact against the Yankees. Of the five balls in play, three were hit with exit velocities of 104.3 mph, 101.1 mph, and 95.6 mph. They had xBAs of .630, .910, and .460, respectively.
But guess what? They were all either on the ground or, in Cody Bellinger’s case, a low line drive. So they resulted in two singles and a groundout. Minimal damage.
This is all a roundabout way to say that there’s clearly a path to success in the big leagues for Mize, but these points will also be true:
- He has a much narrower margin of error.
- He’s more susceptible to the inherent randomness of balls in play, and therefore less reliable on a start-by-start basis.
- His ceiling is much lower than that of a true strikeout pitcher.
Who leads the race right now?
There’s still plenty of baseball left to play this spring, and we’re talking about very small sample sizes.
But if I had to pick a leader right now, it would be Maeda.
I know that Mize hasn’t allowed a single run, and Maeda had that one bad inning against the Red Sox. But Maeda is showing signs of the dominance that attracted the Tigers to him in the first place.
Mize has never been more than a serviceable back-end starter so far in his career, while Maeda has a pretty long track record of being much more than that. Before last season, Maeda had 866.1 career innings with a 3.92 ERA, 1.14 WHIP, and 9.9 strikeouts per nine.
So in a small sample size like spring training, it’s always going to be easier to believe that Maeda is trending back toward something he did for 800 innings than it is to believe Mize is going to do something that he never has before.
As much as I would love to believe that the 27-year-old former No. 1 overall pick is finally breaking out, there isn’t enough evidence. He’s off to a good start, but the Tigers need to see more.
There are also a couple of factors beyond performance at play here. Maeda is the third-highest-paid player in the organization at $10 million this season. Also, Mize can be optioned to Triple-A Toledo, while Maeda cannot.
Those might not be the most important pieces of the puzzle, but if both pitchers continue to dominant all spring, they could act as tiebreakers.
What’s next?
The Tigers play at least one game every day for the next two weeks. They’re off Thursday (March 6), but the next scheduled off day isn’t until March 20.
We’re going to learn a lot more during that time.
Mize will likely make a start this weekend, and both will continue to build up closer to a full starter’s workload. In the meantime, Tigers fans should root for both of them to keep dominating, because we know all too well that there’s no such thing as having too many pitchers.
Injuries decimated the Tigers last season, forcing A.J. Hinch to invoke the “pitching chaos” strategy that carried Detroit to the postseason.
Hinch would rather not do that again. The Tigers have already lost Cobb for who knows how long, so having six legitimate candidates at starting pitcher isn’t a luxury -- it’s a necessity.
Mize is probably sixth right now, but that could change at any moment.
Spring training games don’t matter, but what happens over the next few weeks will have a major impact when the real season begins. (So let fans watch!)
