While the drama of the last few days continues to make waves in national media, the Tigers vs. Tarik Skubal in arbitration isn’t the only point of interest for the club. Ken Rosenthal reports that the front office is still considering adding more starting pitching. Right-handers Chris Bassitt and Lucas Giolito are two targets the Tigers have checked in on as they consider whether their rotation options are deep enough to carry them through the 2026 season. More than likely, the Tigers are just looking at their options and not planning on signing anyone until the Tarik Skubal situation is resolved, but we’ll take a look at Bassitt and Giolito.
In 2025, Skubal and Jack Flaherty each made 31 starts. Casey Mize was healthy all year, giving the Tigers 28 starts. Reese Olson managed 13 before another shoulder injury shut him down the rest of the way. He’s expected to be back, but Jackson Jobe, who made 10 starts before rupturing his UCL, probably won’t return until the second half of the 2026 season even if things go perfectly in his rehabilitation. He’s probably more likely to pitch out of the bullpen once he’s back on the mound.
So assuming they can all repeat their workload, a big if as always, the Tigers roughly have 103 starts covered between those four pitchers. Only one of them, Olson, has options remaining. Olson having a healthy season would obviously be a big deal for the Tigers, as he’s probably their second best starting pitcher at this point.
The Tigers signed right-hander Drew Anderson out of the KBO with the opportunity to compete for a starting role. He and Troy Melton will be the two key names to watch as they compete in spring camp for the fifth starter’s role. Beyond them, the Tigers have some quality depth in the form of Keider Montero and Sawyer Gipson-Long. They have a veteran minor leaguer in Troy Watson who has the stuff to handle a backend starter role, but has never put it together enough to break into the major leagues.
In terms of prospects, left-handers Jake Miller and Andrew Sears are the two best bets for upper level starters who may be able to handle some starting work later on in the season. For now, Miller is coming off an injury plagued season, and both are looking to advance out of the Double-A level this spring and get themselves in a position for a call-up later in the season. Right-hander Ty Madden might be another candidate to make a few spot starts, though his progress has stalled as a prospect and he spent 2025 on the injury list as well.
So, the Tigers appear to be in relatively solid shape in terms of being able to cover 162 starts, with some Brant Hurter or Tyler Holton spot starts mixed in along the way. Getting into better position without signing one of the top free agent starters on the market is going to be pretty difficult.
The difficulty is that adding another starting pitcher on a free agent deal means that they’re then stuck with said pitcher if things aren’t going well with only the option of designating them for assignment. Charlie Morton and Chris Paddack both gave us examples of this scenario in the second half of the 2025 season. As they struggled to provide the required rotation depth, there was no opportunity to work with them to try and get back on track. They couldn’t be optioned, and so the Tigers were left having to decide to either cut them or hope they could turn things around.
That’s the dilemma the Tigers face in considering adding another starter right now. But as Rosenthal is one of the most trustworthy of sources in terms of behind the scenes discussions, let’s consider Bassitt and Giolito as possibilities.
Of the two free agent starters referenced by Rosenthal, the soon-to-be 37-year-old Bassitt is the safer bet despite his age. He threw 157 1/3 innings for the then Oakland Athletics in 2021. Since that point, he’s topped 170 innings every season with only some minor injuries over the course of his last four seasons, the final three of them coming with the Toronto Blue Jays.
Compared to league average for a starting pitcher, Bassitt is slightly above average in terms of strikeout and walk percentages. League average K-rate was 21.8 percent, vs. a BB-rate of 7.8 percent. Bassitt had a 22.6 percent K-rate with the Blue Jays last year with a BB-rate of just 7.1 percent. He generally allows a lower than average home run rate too, so he’s just a bit above average in every regard.
Bassitt mainly relies on his 91-92 mph sinker and his command of that pitch, but while he uses it around 40 percent of the time, he has numerous other offerings in a deep bag of tricks that he can dip into as secondary pitches. He’ll mix in his fourseamer or cutter to go upstairs or jam left-handers. He’ll drop in curveballs and sliders. He will mix in a splitter or a changeup occasionally as well, though both are rarely used. So Bassitt has a lot of tools to work with, and he’s experienced at locating even the lesser used pitches when he needs them. There isn’t one particularly overpowering offering in the bunch, but his command, some deception, and the deep pitch mix helps him keep hitters off balance and unable to get off their A swing on the right pitches.
That ability, combined with his proven durability despite heading into his age 37 season, is going to make for tougher competition in trying to sign him. Bassitt can either force teams into getting ahead of the market by paying him a hefty price on a one or two year deal now, or he can wait until the top names on the market, Framber Valdez and Ranger Suarez, sign elsewhere, leaving other suitors in somewhat dire straits and really needing him to solidify their rotation. Either way, I think he’s bound to do well in free agency, earn well over $20 million per season on a short deal, and have his pick of several good landing spots with potential contenders.
SeasonIPERAK%BB%HR/9FIPfWAR2023200.03.6022.57.11.264.282.62024171.04.1622.29.20.954.082.32025170.13.9622.67.11.164.012.4
While he’s not quite as durable as Bassitt, Lucas Giolito is also coming off a long stretch of relatively healthy seasons as he looks for a new deal entering his age 31 season. He put up a 3.41 ERA over 145 innings for the Boston Red Sox in 2025.
It’s somewhat difficult to keep the memory of Giolito’s early success with the White Sox from coloring impressions of him all these years later. After three really good years with them from 2019-2021, the right-hander’s last three years have been pretty pedestrian overall. His strikeout rates have been in decline ever since, with a major drop hitting in 2025, and he continues to walk more batters than you’d prefer. The variance with him from year to year centers around his propensity to give up home runs in bunches.
Giolito still sits 93-94 mph with his good riding fourseam fastball, which hasn’t changed since his White Sox days. He still throws a lot of changeups and is willing to go right-on-right with the offspeed. His slider has developed into a pitch on par with the changeup in terms of usage, and he rarely mixes in anything beyond those three offerings. All three pitches grade a little above average. The issue is that Giolito has rarely had enough precision to maximize their effectiveness consistently, producing pretty mixed results in recent years as a result.
While his walk rates are generally worse than average, which doesn’t fit the Tigers mantra of controlling the zone, the big issue for Giolito is always his home run rate. He allows more fly balls than ground balls, and doesn’t really get the high volume of pop-ups and weak fly balls that most elite fly ball pitchers do. His year to year results tend to depend on how many home runs he allows and how many baserunners ride home on the long ball when Giolito is on the mound. Put simply, there’s just a lot wider variance in his outcomes from year to year than there is from Bassitt.
SeasonIPERAK%BB%HR/9FIPfWAR2023161.24.9025.48.71.344.061.82024184.14.8825.79.22.005.270.92025145.03.4119.79.11.064.172.0
Giolito can probably be forgiven a bit for his 2023-2024 work, as he neared free agency with a crumbling White Sox club and then spent 2024 pitching for three different teams. Much harder to overlook is the collapse in strikeout rate in 2025 with the Boston Red Sox. The whiff rate on both his fourseamer and changeup dropped significantly, and he was only saved from another season closer to a 5.00 ERA by much better home run prevention while pitching in Fenway Park as his home park.
On the other hand, Giolito threw more pitches in the zone than he has in years, and he did control home runs much better than normal. It’s hard to depend on that, particularly as he doesn’t quite have the high end riding movement on his fourseamer that he did in his prime years. However, his style does play into a theme discussed in our recent article on Justin Verlander as a free agent target. For pitchers that like working at the top of the zone, the ABS challenge system may be a plus by opening up the upper corners of the strike zone. Those corners are rarely called accurately, and umpires tend to be stingy in those regions. There’s at least the possibility that the ABS system helps those pitchers more, or at least punishes them less, than others. In Giolito’s case, however, it could also mean higher walk rates.
What’s clear is that Bassitt is both the better pitcher year to year, and the more consistent one. Giolito can still go off for long stretches where he looks pretty dominant. Routine fly balls and grounders pile up, and he’s able to strand the walks. And then the switch flips and he suddenly gives up home runs in bunches for a few starts. It’s just a lot more volatile profile, whereas Bassitt is likely to give you more quality starts even if he rarely looks dominant from game-to-game.
Giolito is quite a bit younger, and has been pretty durable as well. He makes more sense as a longer contract, lower AAV play for a team that thinks they can get more out of him over multiple seasons. Maybe, and the harsh light of the next CBA negotiation on the far horizon plays into this, Giolito does just take a one-year deal for around $18-20 million, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see him get something with more guaranteed money over multiple years, but with a lower annual salary than Bassitt will command.
The problem with even considering another signing this offseason, is that the Tigers don’t have a clear bead on their current payroll. Obviously the Tigers could afford either pitcher whatever Skubal’s number turns out to be, but unless the Ilitch family changes their minds, the front office is clearly working with some real payroll constraints at this point. And so it feels unlikely that the Tigers will sign anyone until they have Skubal’s number locked in, if even then.
Proabably the Tigers are just checking in with both pitchers and trying to get an idea of their number. Beyond the arbitration uncertainty, there is still at least some small chance of Skubal getting traded, and obviously that would flip the situation on its head and make adding starting pitching in free agency mandatory. But even if they’re seriously thinking of adding another starter to compete with Olson, Melton, and Anderson this spring, they’re probably going to wait and see what happens in arbitration before actually doing anything. Even then it’s pretty hard to imagine them running the payroll up close to $200 million by adding Bassitt or Giolito.
In the end, these rumors just illustrate that there is still a lot up in the air before the Tigers’ 2026 roster really takes solid shape heading into spring camp. And all these contingencies hinge around their ace and his contract status.