Since A.J. Hinch and Chris Fetter came to Detroit following the 2020 season, the Tigers have been in an ongoing overhaul of their minor league player development. That’s par for the course nowadays as teams spent tens of millions of dollars and put enormous effort into finding new edges in developing future major league talent.

However, when they arrived the Tigers were well behind the curve and had a lot of catching up to do, not just in knowledge, but in personnel, facilities, and technology. After their first season as manager and head pitching coach at the major league level, giving them time to evaluate the whole system, the duo were heavily involved in making recommendations to get a moribund development pipeline tuned up into a modern, sustainable source of improvement for their prospects. At the same time the ongoing overhaul of the major and minor league facilities themselves really kicked into high gear and the Scott Harris led front office has continued to add to those investments.

The lynchpin move was the ouster of Dave Littlefield as vice-president of player development and the hiring of Ryan Garko after the 2021 season. Now an assistant general manager in the organization and still overseeing player development, Garko is truly the key figure in the club’s turnaround over the last five seasons in bringing up their minor league talent. He has delivered a veritable golden age of player development for the Tigers, as any longtime fan can tell you. Of course, it helps that the organization has hauled in so much more talent in the draft as well.

One of the key figures hired under Garko was director of pitching, Gabe Ribas. In Ribas, the Tigers did the smart thing. They hunted for a well regarded coach from the top development organizations around the game and got busy poaching talent. Kenny Graham, hired out of the Milwaukee Brewers development system in 2019 as player development director, moved over as director of hitting, while Ribas, for several years the Los Angeles Dodgers minor league pitching coordinator, took over running pitching development.

Results came quickly as as pitchers like Wilmer Flores, Keider Montero, Brant Hurter, and many others began making significant strides. After a rough start to his pro career in 2021 and 2022, top pitching prospect Jackson Jobe made big leaps forward in 2023 and 2024. The Tigers traded for a decent but pretty unheralded pitching prospect in Reese Olson and by the end of his first full season with the Tigers in 2022, the right-hander was breaking out and on course for his strong MLB debut in 2023. In time, relief prospects like Jason Foley, Alex Lange, Gregory Soto, Beau Brieske and others would provide homegrown relief help on a level the Tigers never approached during their last good era of baseball from 2011-2014. They capped that off with Troy Melton’s breakthrough 2025 season.

They’ve had some tough failures too. Matt Manning just never found a secondary pitch that really worked for him. Wilmer Flores burned brightly and has since crashed to Earth. Ty Madden hasn’t been able to take the next step and then spent the 2025 season injured. Sawyer Gipson-Long got a lot better and for a brief moment looked like a future rotation piece but wasn’t able to pick up where he left off from Tommy John surgery this year. Most of the relief prospects have washed out the past two years too. But overall they put together a pretty good burst of talent from 2023-2025.

Ribas represented a major upgrade, and we’ve covered the much improved results over the last half decade. Yet somewhere along the way, after several years of improvement and more and more homegrown arms developing into higher ranked prospects and ultimately major league talent, the pitching pipeline has started to run out of gas, and Scott Harris and his staff need to figure out how to get things back on track.

They’ll get a chance to adjust their course this offseason, as it was announced on Tuesday that Ribas has left the organization to join the Colorado Rockies as an assistant pitching coach under new head pitching coach Alon Leichman. The Rockies are going through a major overhaul as new president of baseball ops, Paul DePodesta and new GM Josh Byrnes hunt for talent to rejuvenate the moribund organization. Several coaching hires for new manager Warren Schaeffer’s staff were announced along with Ribas.

The loss of Ribas might seem like a problem, but it’s not much of a surprise. He was hired under Al Avila right at the beginning of Ryan Garko’s tenure as director of player development. After four years, it’s probably time for some new perspectives, and an injury riddled farm system that no longer has a pitcher in their top ten prospects according to Baseball America—I might argue for Kelvis Salcedo, myself—says it’s a good time for a change. There were murmurs that this might be Ribas last year with the Tigers during the season.

That’s not to pin things on Ribas either. The Tigers’ pitching development is worlds better than it’s ever been, but it’s just a constant race to innovate and improve now. The injury trouble is likely a function of the the Tigers draft strategy. This is the one area where they do go after a lot of higher risk, higher reward talent by targeting so many prep arms. Organizations make changes when your department is struggling, and that’s all this is. Scott Harris inherited Ribas, and now he and Jeff Greenberg can work with Garko to find their guy.

Take a look at this list of pitchers the Tigers have drafted, or acquired as prospects since Harris took over the organization prior to the 2023 season. The way assistant manager and director of scouting, Rob Metzler, and amateur scouting director, Mark Conner, have run the first three drafts since Harris brought on them on board has been to take a lot of talented prep pitchers they believed were signable, and pay them over slot to make it happen.

They balance that out with the occasional early round college pitcher they think has slipped through the cracks. Malachi Witherspoon was that guy in the most recent draft. They handle the bonuses by going underslot or minimum on most of their college picks, understanding that they may take a player or two who won’t sign. It’s way too early to concern ourselves with the 2025 draft class, so we’ll stick to the first two under Harris. Just remember that the bonus each pitcher signed for says more about how the Tigers valued them than the actual round they were taken does.

3rd round: LHP Paul Wilson ($1,697,500 – $751K overslot) Lakeridge High School

5th round: RHP Jaden Hamm ($397,500 – $45K underslot) Middle Tennessee State

8th round RHP Jatnk Diaz ($247,500 – $35K overslot) Hazleton Area High School

9th round RHP Hayden Minton ($162,500 – $20K underslot) Missouri State

10th round: LHP Andrew Sears ($167,500 – $2500 underslot) Connecticut

12th round RHP Andrew Dunford ($367,500) Houston County High School

16th round RHP Donye Evans ($150,000) UNC Charlotte

19th round RHP Blake Pivaroff (N/A) Arizona State

20th round RHP Johnathan Rogers ($150,000) Tupelo High School

2nd round RHP Owen Hall ($1.89M) Edmond North High School

3rd round LHP Ethan Schiefelbein ($1.09M) Corona High School

4th round RHP Josh Randall ($892,600) University of San Diego

RHP Michael Massey ($637,200) Wake Forest

LHP Ethan Sloan ($221,400) Regis University

RHP Zach Swanson ($195,100) Toutle Lake High School

RHP RJ Sales ($183,000) UNC-Wilmington

RHP Lucas Elissalt – Chipola College

RHP Preston Howey – St. Mary’s

RHP Anson Siebert – Blue Valley Southwest

RHP Bryce Alewine – Southern Union State JC

LHP Chase Davis – Leon High School

RHP Dawson Price – Eastern Oklahoma State JC

Joseph Montalvo – Acquired from the Texas Rangers for Andrew Chafin, July 2024

LHP Blake Dickerson – Acquired at age 19 from San Diego Padres for $500K in international bonus pool money. Originally a 2023 12th rounder picked by the Padres and paid well over slot.

RHP Eric Silva – Acquired from San Francisco Giants for Mark Canha, July 2024

RHP Zach Lee – Undrafted free agent

You can’t really complain about a farm system’s pitching in a year in which they graduated Jackson Jobe and Troy Melton both. Still, behind them the crop looks a bit thin in the upper levels. And further down, most of Harris’ first two draft classes are nowhere to be found.

Of the six pitching prospects drafted for the biggest bonus pools in 2023-2024, Josh Randall was traded along with R.J. Sales for Kyle Finnegan at the trade deadline. Everyone else filled up injury lists this year.

Owen Hall appeared in four games at the Single-A level at the beginning of the year, his velocity was a good deal lower than in some of his training footage in the offseason, and he was done for the year on May 1. Zach Swanson had UCL reconstruction surgery before the season started. Massey was shut down in the spring for undisclosed reasons and did not pitch. Ethan Schiefelbein appeared in three Complex League games. After looking pretty rough in his brief Complex League pro debut in 2024 as a 19-year-old, Paul Wilson appeared in three games this season and was done for the year. Andrew Dunford is only 20 but has only made a handful of brief appearances in his two years in the system.

The mitigating factor is that most of these guys are still very young, still 21 or younger. You accept some injury risk with any pitcher, but particularly with players that haven’t been sorted by the rigors of college ball yet. There’s an extra risk added there to balance the potential reward of a talented arm out of high school before they’ve made their name in college play. Still, that’s a lot of injuries, and most of their top picks haven’t even pitched any real innings in the Complex League yet.

Joseph Montalvo is still a little underpowered and his command didn’t improve much in his 10 start look at Double-A before he too hit the injured list in early June. Dickerson threw 24 1/3 innings in Complex ball last year as a 19-year-old, but he too did not appear at all in 2025. Eric Silva came back from injury late in the season and was throwing harder and looking a little sharper overall, so he may be a bright spot to look forward to if he can carry it into 2026.

Jaden Hamm showed himself a fairly talented pitching prospect in 2024, and we’ll look for a rebound in 2026. His velocity was down significantly much of the season and he had a stint on the injured list too, but he did manage to start 22 games anyway. The stuff just backed up at times and he was hit harder, while progress on his slider and changeup was erratic. Still, everyone is allowed one off year and Hamm is still a legitimate pitching prospect who could pan out as a starting pitcher if he can bounce back physically in 2026.

My two favorite under the radar pitchers in the system this year were RHP Lucas Elissalt and LHP Micah Ashman. The lefty reliever went to Baltimore in exchange for Charlie Morton. Elissalt already has a pretty well composed pitch mix and good command. He could use a few ticks on his heater but he had a great first full season out of Chipola and I’m excited to follow his development. As Tigers Minor League Report pointed out to me earlier this offseason, Elissalt’s older brother is a pitcher and took a little time before building up to mid 90’s velocity, so hopefully his younger brother will develop physically to a similar degree.

One more bright spot was Andrew Sears, who improved enough to look like a future piece of the Tigers’ bullpen. The left-hander pitched really well down the stretch for the Erie SeaWolves and saw command of a good slider-changeup combination improve while he also popped a more consistent 94-95 mph sinker. There’s still a chance he could start, and if not he has the look of a good hybrid lefty who will be comfortable working out of the pen while chipping in a spot start or three throughout a season. His move to the Triple-A level will be worth watching in 2026, and he’s a decent bet to pitch for the Tigers at some point next year.

Still, my favorite lefty in the system remains Jake Miller, who missed a ton of time to undisclosed injuries that are assumed, but not certain, to be shoulder related. Miller has a good changeup and his fastball has ramped up to touch 95-96 mph more often over the past two years. His breaking stuff is pretty fringy, but he has outstanding command already and is the type where adding a cutter as a fourth weapon might really tie the whole set of pitches together really well if the slider doesn’t improve a little more. His ability to locate his stuff consistently is a big selling point and a key reason the Tigers made sure to add him to the 40-man roster and protect him from the Rule 5 draft.

Jatnk Diaz showed some signs of life, and was easily the most raw of any of these pitchers coming out of high school. His fastball is on track to be an above average pitch and he can spin the baseball. Still his command is a work in progress and we’ll see if he can put together a full season of A-ball and start making progress in his age 21 season. Preston Howey is interesting. Ethan Sloan was effective. The three are still more in the category of lottery tickets than notable pitching prospects, but they are young.

If we look beyond the draft and trades to the Tigers international free agents there are certainly some additional bright spots. None more than RHP Kelvis Salcedo, who emerged out of Complex ball throwing in the mid-90’s with a nasty slider and splitter combination. The 19-year-old has a long way to go but his run in August and September after moving up to Single-A was the rare example of a pitcher really breaking out of the Complex, extended camp, zone. He’s arguably a top ten prospect in the system now after displaying the nastiest full set of pitches on the minor league side of the organization.

Right-hander Carlos Marcano, an international free agent signing from January 2021, had a late season velocity boost after working hard to rehab a midseason injury. He’ll be well worth watching in 2026 as well.

RHP Rayner Castillo and LHP Gabriel Reyes each had a down year after modest 2024 breakouts, but pitched better down the stretch. Castillo at least threw 96 2/3 innings at the High-A level and just turned 21 years old. He needs to keep building himself up physically to take the next step as his velocity and overall stuff faded somewhat in 2025.

Reyes turned 22 and struggled early in the season, but his downright lethal slider carried him until the fastball ticked up and his command improved later in the season. Still, he wasn’t even able to crack the High-A level yet. 2026 will be a pretty big year for both of them in deciding whether they take a step up or drift off the ladder into lottery ticket status. Still, a stall year for a pitching prospect is pretty natural and our evaluations of them probably won’t change too much in our next Tigers prospect list and reports. Both are more on a reliever track right now though.

We can go on and on, and we will go on and on once our 2026 BYB prospect list for the Tigers drops in a few weeks. The point is, the Tigers pitching development was on a really nice trajectory and flattened out the past two seasons. That’s probably not a coaching issue so much as a young pitchers’ issue, but whoever is to blame, the result is that the future beyond 2027-2028 isn’t looking very good at the moment from a pitching standpoint. One also wonders about the many millions of dollars the Tigers have spent expanding their medical and strength and conditioning staff, and building a whole in-house biomechanics department, etc. Those investments don’t seem to be paying off very well right now, but perhaps things will look better a year or two down the road.

Picking a ton of prep pitchers in the draft tends to come with a lot of injury trouble. Player development isn’t linear in the first place, and that’s even more true with prep pitching. Some of this was predictable as they take on the workload of a professional, but this is still an awful lot of significant injuries.

The question is whether this is just a minor blip in some of their development or not. By this time next year, the Tigers extensive stockpile of young arm talent could look much better and this will all be no more than the type of scary season that is bound to happen sometimes with a whole hoard of inexperienced pitchers who are still just 19 or 20 years old. If it doesn’t turn around, the Tigers are going to have a major problem trying to sustain the relative success of the past two seasons into a presumably Tarik Skubal-less future.

The Tigers could choose to replace Ribas internally, but it seems like a good time to bring in a fresh pair of eyes. College pitching coaches are starting to get more looks from big league teams lately, and they come equipped with a lot more player management and administrative experience than some dedicated pro pitching coaches. Plucking a good young pitching coordinator from another MLB team would be the most recommended route. However it turns out, the Tigers new director of pitching should be the most important off-field hire of the offseason.