Framber Valdez Signing Establishes the Tigers as AL Central Favorites

The biggest name remaining in free agency is now off the board, as Framber Valdez agreed to a three-year, $115 million contract with the Detroit Tigers on Wednesday night. The 32-year-old lefty, who ranked fourth on our Top 50 Free Agents list, hit the open market for the first time in his major league career this winter after parts of eight seasons with the Astros. In his final season in Houston, Valdez put up a 3.66 ERA and a 3.37 FIP in 31 starts over 192 innings, good enough to reach the 4.0-WAR mark for the third time in his career. His new deal with the Tigers comes with an opt out after the 2027 season, $20 million of the deal in the form of a signing bonus, and some unknown amount of deferred money, which will reduce the overall value of his contract by, well, an unknown amount.

For the Tigers, the benefits of adding Valdez to the rotation are quite clear. Of course, he would improve any team, since having too many good pitchers has been an actual problem zero times in baseball history, but he fits Detroit’s needs like a glove. The Tigers have managed to get their rotation through the season successfully over the last two years despite a lack of depth, but come playoff time, they have basically gone with a starting staff of Tarik Skubal and a trio of shrug emojis. Don’t believe me? Detroit has played 15 games across the last two postseasons, and I will now run down the full list of five-inning starts by Tigers pitchers with last names that aren’t Skubal:

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Oh, sorry, I was eating tacos. There aren’t any players on that list. Signing Valdez gives the Tigers a dependable no. 2 starter, one who is better and with a better health record than Jack Flaherty. While I’m chaotic-neutral enough to get a thrill out of A.J. Hinch’s admitting in press conferences that he and the front office were basically coming up with the pitcher assignments as they went along, I’m sure that’s not an ideal scenario for making decisions.

Valdez has never had that crazy year that put him near the top of the Cy Young race — though he has received down-ballot votes in half of his seasons and placed as high as fifth in 2022 — but since his 2020 breakout campaign, he ranks sixth among pitchers in WAR and fifth in innings pitched.

The Tigers project to fall somewhere between 80 and 90 wins, the range where adding wins is the most valuable, so they likely will get maximum punch with the Valdez upgrade. Last week, when I put out the first run of ZiPS projected 2026 standings, the Tigers had a 50th-percentile projection of 83 wins, a 36.7% chance of winning the division, and a 49.3% shot of making the playoffs. A bump now to 85 wins may not sound impressive, but just those two wins are enough to change to those percentages to 50.1% and 66.2%. The 20th-percentile projection went up about 3 1/2 wins, as Valdez does a lot to mitigate the risk of having one pitcher, Skubal, make up a large percentage of the team’s pitching value. In the simulations where the back-to-back Cy Young winner pitches zero innings in 2026 — I won’t specify why in order to avoid jinxing him — the Tigers made the playoffs only 6% of the time. With Valdez on the team, that number increases to 14%. “It limits our downside scenarios in case of disaster” isn’t the sexiest reason to acquire a player, but it’s an important one.

As to the contract itself, while many of headlines you see will say stuff like “Highest Annual Value Ever for a Left-Handed Pitcher!” the annual value isn’t really that crucial to whether or not the contract works out. I would much rather have a record-breaking three-year contract with a pitcher than a more mundane average salary over an eight-year deal. I’d offer a three-year, $115 million pact with an opt out over an eight-year, $240 million one any day. It takes some creativity for any three-year deal that goes poorly to significantly damage a team’s long-term plans.

Now, ZiPS would only want to pay Valdez about $80 million, but this was basically a bidding war for the last really meaningful free agent pitcher without a major “but” attached to him. The next available starting pitcher on our Top 50 list is the 19th-ranked Zac Gallen, followed by Chris Bassitt, who came in at no. 35. This is a situation where a team like the Tigers (or the Orioles, Giants, Cubs, Astros, or any other club that was in on Valdez) shouldn’t be worried about the isolated efficiency that a mean ol’ projection system wants to see. Salary projections are general guides, not grading rubrics.

As in a number of other contracts this offseason, you can feel the looming shadow of the expiring CBA between MLB and the MLBPA. The $20 million bonus and the deferral hedge against lost games and salary in 2027, and with an opt-out decision after 2027 instead of after this year means he doesn’t have to make the decision whether to wade into an uncertain morass. The Tigers get something out of this unrelated to the CBA; not giving Valdez an opt out after 2026 keeps the rotation from becoming a smoking crater the first year after Skubal is set to hit free agency.

With Valdez, the Tigers are getting the pitcher they needed at a price they wanted, and a whole bunch of teams that could’ve used him aren’t. This is a very solid move, and as a Baltimore native, I’m rather disgruntled it wasn’t the O’s that made it.