Reid Detmers Commands His Fate

Reid Detmers has saved his career — again.

Detmers, if you weren’t aware, is a top 10 starting pitcher to this point in 2026. He has accrued 2.0 WAR, which is slightly more than Chris Sale, Max Fried, and Jesús Luzardo. If it weren’t for Cristopher Sánchez, Detmers might have a case as the best lefty starter in baseball right now. He’s also been the Angels’ best pitcher, even a step ahead of José Soriano, who burst onto the national stage with a red-hot April before cooling in recent weeks. Detmers has kept plugging away, quietly — surprisingly — excelling in the background.

If you’d told me in 2022 that Detmers would be a top 10 starter in baseball by 2026, I would have said, “Sure, that sounds reasonable.” That was his first “full” season in the majors, and he posted a 3.79 FIP with fine peripherals. Yes, he got sent down for about a month in the summer to work on some things, but it was a solid rookie season overall. He even showcased his ceiling with a no hitter that May.

It’s what happened in the seasons that followed that makes this one of the most unexpected early performances of the year. Detmers didn’t improve in 2023. He struck out more batters, which is good, but he developed a pesky command issue that resulted in more walks and home runs. And things got worse in 2024. He again boosted his strikeout rate, and he again gave up more walks and home runs than he had the year before. By June, the Angels had seen enough and sent him down to Triple-A. They recalled him in September for five final starts, and when he returned? Even more strikeouts, even more walks, and even more homers.

Detmers looked like an obvious reliever candidate, and the Angels agreed, moving him to the bullpen in 2025 to salvage what looked like a dwindling career. It was a perfect match. He ditched his broader starter’s repertoire for a simple three-pitch mix. His stuff ticked up, with his fastball velocity leaping from 93.8 mph in 2024 to 95.8 mph out of the bullpen. For the fifth year in a row, Detmers raised his strikeout rate. But for the first time as a big leaguer, he cut back on the walks and homers. He made 61 appearances out of the bullpen and turned in a 3.12 FIP, making him one of the 50 or so best relievers in the majors.

This was about as big of a pitching development success as the Angels have had in the 2020s. Again, Detmers was a perfect candidate for this transition, and he executed it flawlessly. That’s why it was odd to hear rumblings of a return to the rotation. Even in the middle of last season, the Angels seemed set on — and convinced of — Detmers’ future as a starter. Here’s what former manager Ron Washington told The Athletic in June 2025:

“That’s just a prelude to him getting back in the rotation,” Angels manager Ron Washington said of Detmers’ success out of the bullpen. “Now he has learned how to get outs, because when you come out that bullpen, it’s about one thing: getting outs. And getting them as quickly as possible. When Reid Detmers gets back into the rotation, he’s going to be a force to be reckoned with.”

It’s also just not that common for anyone to go from a full-time reliever to a full-time starter. Between 1962 and 2025, only 20 pitchers made at least 30 appearances as reliever in a season, only to make at least 10 starts the next.

Detmers is now the 21st, and he’s “on pace” to be among the best:



If you were to watch a Detmers start from 2024 and then one from 2026 back-to-back, you likely wouldn’t notice much difference. His windup is the same, albeit a bit quicker now. His arm angle is essentially the same. His pitch mix is the same, with a fastball, slider, changeup, curveball, and rare sinker all thrown at roughly the same rates. The radar gun flashes the same, too, with the velocity bump now gone. This still looks like Reid Detmers. And yet, he’s having success now that he wasn’t before.

That’s because Detmers didn’t need to fundamentally change his identity as a starter. He’s always had a nice, broad arsenal, with a range of movements and velocities. He’s always proven highly capable of missing bats. No, his failure as a starter on the first go ’round — and what’s made him successful early in 2026 — all comes down to command: throwing the ball in the strike zone, and ideally avoiding the center. He wasn’t doing that before. He is doing it now. Not much else has changed, and the effect has been extraordinary.

It’s interesting to see how our various stuff and command metrics have changed when contrasting Detmers’ poor showing as a starter in 2024, his excellence as a reliever in 2025, and his success back in the rotation this year:

We can see his stuff bumped up out of the bullpen, and has since returned to where it was before. The two ticks he gained on his fastball as a reliever are gone. What’s interesting is that his command improved in the bullpen, and he’s maintained those gains now that he’s back in the rotation. It seems like less of a mechanical adjustment and more related to his approach. In that same article from The Athletic I referenced above, Detmers, his teammates, and the org talked about how the bullpen forced him to shift his mindset from trying to set up hitters on the edges, to simply attacking the zone with his best stuff. That’s exactly what he’s doing in 2026.

Let’s look at his four-seam fastball. It’s the pitch he throws the most to hitters on both sides of the plate, and he throws it a lot both 0-0 and when he falls behind. It’s his “strike” pitch, in other words. The ideal strike pitch is generally in the zone, but not down the middle. We can see where Detmers was throwing that pitch in 2024 (left) versus 2026 (right):

The biggest, most obvious change is in that top plot against lefties. In 2024, he was trying to ride the rail, often missing above the zone for a ball. Detmers struggled with walks in 2024 against everyone, but especially against lefties, and the fastball was generally what he threw for ball four. That isn’t ideal for a strike pitch. This year, he’s getting the pitch more down and out. It’s catching a lot of the zone, and it’s getting hit hard when batter’s make contact. But they’re whiffing on the heater more often this year, and it’s ultimately serving its purpose as a strike-getter. Detmers’ approach to the fastball against righties doesn’t seem too different from 2024, though it’s generating a lot of fly balls and pop outs this year.

The slider is where it gets interesting:

The pitch has been much better located to lefties. He used to hang it middle-middle all the time. This year he’s landing it perfectly in that low-and-away part of the zone. Lefties haven’t been able to do much with it beyond drive it into the ground or whiff. The slider still appears to be catching quite a bit of the plate against righties, but there’s a subtle change in which part that seems to be helping, with his “danger miss” rate dropping from 14.8% to 9.1%. Righties’ hard-hit rate on the slider has dropped 10 points from 2024 to a mere 25% in 2026.

This improved command was on display in his 14-strikeout game against the Rangers last month. Half those strikeouts came on the slider. Here’s where he located the pitch that day: 


It isn’t obvious from the plot, but the dots in the strike zone were thrown in counts before two strikes. He pounded the zone with sliders to get ahead, especially against righties, and these look like generally good, strike-throwing locations. They’re down, or in, or out — anywhere but the heart of the plate:

In two-strike counts, all but one of his sliders finished down and out of the zone (the one that didn’t painted the black). Most of those had that perfect proximity to the strike zone where the batter can’t reach it but also can’t quite lay off. There were several pitches that look just like this, from shape to location to result:

This wasn’t even Detmers’ best start by the various location metrics. That’s just kind of how he’s throwing his slider these days. By Location+, it’s the second-best located slider in the majors this year. Detmers now ranks in the top 10 by Location+ across all pitches — not two years removed from ranking near the bottom.

Sometimes these sorts of analyses are surprising or complicated or require extraordinary nuance. Not here. We knew what was missing in 2024 when Detmers struggled. He addressed it when he moved to the bullpen last year. And he’s maintained those improvements into 2026. He’s not perfect. He’s not a true command artist. But he’s now on the attack, getting the most from an arsenal that’s excited scouts and analysts for years. Detmers is no longer a passive power pitcher limited to the bullpen. He’s taken control of his career, and found himself a fresh start.