The injury in question was a sports hernia that required surgery at the end of October.\u00a0 Torres said he\u2019d been playing through the pain for most of the season\u2019s second half, which explains his rather stark splits.\u00a0 After hitting .281\/.387\/.425 in 359 plate appearances prior to the All-Star break, Torres slumped to a .223\/.320\/.339 slash line in his final 269 regular-season plate appearances, plus he hit only .235\/.316\/.382 over 38 postseason PA.<\/p>\n
The end result was an overall set of numbers (.258\/.358\/.387 with 16 homers in 628 PA) that weren\u2019t far off Torres\u2019 numbers in his last Yankees season.\u00a0 Since the sports hernia provided a pretty clear reason for Torres\u2019 downturn, the Tigers still felt comfortable making Torres the $22.025MM qualifying offer, and the club is confident that a healthy Torres will look a lot more like the first-half version from 2025.\u00a0 From Torres\u2019 perspective, he still gets a healthy raise over his 2025 salary and returns to a familiar and welcome environment.<\/p>\n
For Flaherty, he ended up choosing the Tigers for the third straight offseason.\u00a0 Flaherty inked a one-year, $14MM free agent pact with Detroit in December 2023, and he ended up winning a World Series ring with the Dodgers after the righty was dealt to Los Angeles at the trade deadline.\u00a0 Flaherty then returned to Motown on a two-year, $35MM guarantee, which broke down as a $5MM signing bonus, a $20MM salary in 2025, and then $10MM in 2026.\u00a0 However, Flaherty added an extra $10MM to his 2026 salary in the form of a bonus clause triggered when he made his 15th start of the 2025 season.<\/p>\n
Since Flaherty\u2019s previous forays into free agency came after in-season trades, he had never been eligible for a qualifying offer until last fall.\u00a0 Detroit therefore could\u2019ve issued Flaherty a QO if he had opted out, and having draft compensation attached to his services may well have adversely impacted Flaherty\u2019s market.\u00a0 Opting out and seeing if the Tigers floated a QO might\u2019ve landed Flaherty an extra $2.025MM, but the safer move was just to stay in his present contract.<\/p>\n
As with Torres\u2019 camp, Flaherty said his reps at Wasserman checked out the market before he had to make his option decision, but ultimately, \u201cnot everything is about money.\u00a0 Especially when you are in a place you feel you have a chance to win,\u201d the right-hander told Chris McCosky of the Detroit News<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an unbelievable team in here,\u201d Flaherty said.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s an unbelievable group of guys.\u00a0 It\u2019s a group you want to be a part of\u2026.I\u2019ve gotten a lot better the last two years being here.\u00a0 Another year working with [the coaching staff] and building those relationships through another offseason, to go back and forth with them, it pays dividends.\u201d<\/p>\n Since Flaherty was only able to land that two-year, $35MM guarantee following a solid 2024 season, he might have found a less welcome market in the wake of a 2025 campaign that saw his numbers go backwards in most major statistical categories.\u00a0 Flaherty posted a 4.64 ERA over 161 innings last year, with an above-average 27.6% strikeout rate but a subpar walk rate (8.7%), hard-hit ball rate (43.8%), and barrel rate (10.3%).\u00a0 Flaherty\u2019s 3.67 SIERA was almost a run superior to his real-world ERA, yet it was far from the kind of ideal platform year that would\u2019ve guaranteed the 30-year-old a significant multi-year contract.<\/p>\n Retaining Torres and Flaherty, re-signing Kyle Finnegan<\/a>, and signing Kenley Jansen<\/a> and Drew Anderson<\/a> stood as the Tigers\u2019 most significant moves for much of the offseason.\u00a0 This relatively quiet winter suddenly sparked earlier this month, when Detroit made a pair of major rotation signings in Framber Valdez<\/a> and team legend Justin Verlander<\/a>.\u00a0 These additions bolstered the pitching staff to the point that Flaherty may now be the fifth starter, depending on how the team chooses to line up Flaherty, Verlander, and Casey Mize<\/a> behind the top two of Tarik Skubal<\/a> and Valdez.<\/p>\n As for the everyday mix, Torres and Spencer Torkelson<\/a> are the most prominent right-handed bats within a lineup that still tilts heavily to the left side.\u00a0 Despite multiple rumors linking the Tigers to Alex Bregman<\/a> and a few other position players, Detroit basically stood pat with its lineup, putting more pressure on Torres and the rest of the hitters to deliver a more consistent performance in 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The injury in question was a sports hernia that required surgery at the end of October.\u00a0 Torres said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367062,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2386],"tags":[5,147,53,2583,95,84,4,594],"class_list":{"0":"post-587355","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-detroit-tigers","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-detroit","10":"tag-detroit-tigers","11":"tag-detroittigers","12":"tag-gleyber-torres","13":"tag-jack-flaherty","14":"tag-mlb","15":"tag-tigers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116116799108070653","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}