The Latest Relievers Off the Board Are Tommy Kahnle and Ryne Stanek

Y’know that point in the last few rounds of every fantasy football draft when kickers and defenses start flying off the board? We’ve reached the MLB offseason version of that, when teams start making sure their bullpens are composed of relievers more akin to Brandon Aubrey than the Panthers’ defense. With the rush on relief pitching officially on, the Tigers and Mets both agreed to one-year deals with right-handed, back of the ‘pen types on Wednesday. Detroit signed Tommy Kahnle at a salary of $7.75 million for 2025, while New York guaranteed Ryne Stanek $4.5 million for his services this year, with another $500,000 available in incentives.

In 2024, Detroit’s starters threw 753 innings, while the team’s relievers nearly matched that number with 694 innings — a league-best mark for innings thrown among major league bullpens. Maintaining success while covering such a large quantity of innings is tricky business. “One of our great strengths last year was our ability to throw different looks at hitters and try to limit the number of times a hitter saw the same type of look or shape or slot in a given series.” Tigers GM Scott Harris told reporters after the Kahnle signing, “Tommy gives us a look we didn’t have.”

Alongside Kahnle, the main characters in the Tigers bullpen are likely to be right-handers Jason Foley, Beau Brieske, and Will Vest, with Tyler Holton, Sean Guenther, and Brant Hurter making up the left-handed contingent. Foley and Holton handled most of the late-inning, high-leverage work last year, with Vest and Brieske next in line to get crucial outs. Now Kahnle offers an additional option in close-game scenarios. And as one would expect from such a bullpen-reliant team, a full cast of contributors sits waiting in the wings, be they starters asked to handle a long relief role, such as Matt Manning, Ty Madden, and Kenta Maeda, or minor leaguers with options and big league experience, such as Brenan Hanifee and Alex Lange (who is working his way back from a season-ending lat injury).

As for those different looks, Kahnle will be joining a diverse group of right-handers on the Tigers’ staff. Foley throws from a low three-quarters slot and plays a 97 mph sinker with arm-side run off an 89 mph slider. Vest uses a similar approach with his sinker and slider, but from a higher arm slot, and he further differentiates himself with his primary pitch, a four-seam fastball with enough rise to change the hitter’s eye level. Brieske mixes a high three-quarters arm slot with an approach designed around varying the velocity and vertical movement between his 96 mph four-seamer and an 88 mph changeup with less rise. Kahnle, like Brieske, throws a similar fastball/changeup combo, but from a lower slot and with vastly different pitch usage rates. Kahnle threw his 87 mph changeup 73% of the time last year, mixing in his 94 mph four-seamer just 19% of the time. Add the lefties to the mix, and the variation in arm slots, movement profiles, and usage patterns does indeed provide a lot of different looks for hitters to contend with.

If you watched Kahnle pitch for the Yankees last October, you’ll know he went from throwing his changeup 73% of the time during the regular season to throwing the pitch almost exclusively, and to great effect, in the postseason. But he hasn’t always been such a changeup-forward pitcher. The 2025 season will be Kahnle’s 10th in the majors, and for the first five, his changeup usage fluctuated between 20% and 40%. But as of 2019, the pitch surpassed his four-seamer as his most thrown offering, and the gap in usage between the two pitches has only grown wider in subsequent years. Kahnle’s increased reliance on his changeup over the years loosely mirrors the broader changes in pitching philosophy across baseball, with teams moving away from anchoring secondary pitches to a primary fastball thrown more than 50% of the time and toward empowering pitchers to throw their best pitch most frequently, even if that pitch is a changeup. And Kahnle’s changeup, which graded out at 119 by Stuff+ last season, is significantly better than his fastball, which only rated as an 80.

Though Kahnle’s new, nontraditional approach makes him a good fit for a Tigers bullpen looking to keep hitters guessing by mixing methodologies, it highlights that he’s been around long enough to have seen both sides of a major shift in pitching strategy. On the one hand, it shows a proven track record of adaptability. On the other, Kahnle is entering his age-35 season, in a role that’s already known for its volatility. His velocity has ticked down over the past couple of years and he’s gotten hit around a bit more, which are concerning trends, but he also posted much stronger numbers in the second half of last season, when you might expect an aging pitcher to start looking gassed. Overall, he’s remained well above average, so there’s a long way for him to decline before he stops being a positive contributor to a big league bullpen. And since Detroit only committed to one year of Kahnle, his age is worth acknowledging, but not worth fretting over.

Though younger than Kahnle, 2025 will be Stanek’s age-33 season and his ninth year in the majors. Setting aside an injury-muddled 2020, Stanek has been reliably above average on the mound ever since establishing himself as a full-time big leaguer in 2018 — at least until last season. In 2024, Stanek posted a 127 ERA-, his first time topping the 100 league-average mark in a season where he pitched more than 20 innings. Stanek began the season in Seattle and pitched to a 4.38 ERA until the Mariners traded him to the Mets for outfielder Rhylan Thomas. After giving up seven earned runs in his first four innings with his new team, Stanek evened out his performance, allowing just four runs over his final 12.1 innings and continuing that momentum in October.

Whether you interpret last year’s down performance as the beginning of the end for a reliever creeping into his mid-30s, or as a blip largely attributable to bad luck, likely depends on how you interpret the relationship between Stanek’s actual production and his expected stats. Over his career, Stanek has pretty consistently posted an ERA that’s half a run or so lower than his FIP. Typically, when a pitcher’s ERA is less than his FIP, it’s attributable to a disproportionate dollop of luck helping the defense convert batted balls into outs. But when it happens consistently over several seasons, it’s more likely due to the pitcher’s inherent ability to induce weak contact. Similarly, Stanek’s wOBA allowed is reliably lower than his xWOBA, and so on and so forth with his FIP compared to his xFIP. The only year that doesn’t conform to Stanek’s recurring pattern is 2024:

It’s unlikely Stanek will ever approach his 2022 peak, but bouncing back in the neighborhood of 2023-Stanek or maybe even 2021-Stanek feels within the realm of possibility. He still throws his four-seamer 98 mph, and all three of his pitches are well above average according to Stuff+. If he can maintain enough feel to execute all three pitches, better days lie ahead.

Based on how Mets manager Carlos Mendoza deployed Stanek in the postseason, it’s likely New York plans to use the righty in a setup role alongside newly acquired left-hander A.J. Minter. The Mets’ other high-leverage options include closer Edwin Díaz, Reed Garrett, and José Buttó. The remaining bullpen spots are somewhat in flux, as the Mets have made a flurry of waiver claims and minor league signings to bring in arms to compete for roster spots with their existing relief options. Pitchers in the mix include Danny Young (the only other lefty option), Dedniel Núñez, Sean Reid-Foley, Tylor Megill, Huascar Brazobán, and Griffin Canning, among others.

By padding out their list of spring training invitees with a myriad of middling relievers, it’s clear the Mets don’t want to be overly dependent on Stanek returning to form. However, they did see what he can be at the end of last year and obviously have some confidence that whatever he figured out in October will carry over to 2025.

Ultimately, there’s no meaningful downside to handing out one-year deals to relievers. Every team should be handing out as many one-year deals to relievers as they can. The Tigers are doing it. The Mets are doing it. As it turns out, some clichés are clichés because they’re true, and the one about how you can never have too much pitching? That one’s true, and it counts double in the bullpen.