The Tigers had one notable announcement on Monday that didn’t involve the weather. Right-hander Ty Madden, our preseason seventh ranked Tigers prospect, has been promoted to Triple-A Toledo. Right-hander Austin Bergner will swap places with Madden and move back down to Double-A Erie.
Madden should now be in line to take Matt Manning’s turn in the Mud Hens rotation on Tuesday night in Columbus against the Clippers. Manning, as was noted in the series preview thread, appears set to pitch in Game 2 of Tuesday’s Tigers-Cardinals doubleheader to make up for Monday night’s rain out.
Madden was the Tigers competitive balance round A selection and the 32nd overall pick in the 2021 draft out of Texas. He reached Double-A Erie in August of 2022 and spent all of last season there, compiling a 3.43 ERA/3.94 FIP over 118 innings. His 29.7 percent strikeout rate last season was very good, but high walk and home run rates for the level, mainly due to some difficulties with left-handers, kept some skepticism in play about his ability to develop further. In 2024, though four starts, he’s really addressed those issues nicely while maintaining a high strikeout rate of 32.4 percent.
The difference in his 2023 splits was stark. Left-handers posted an .871 OPS with 12 home runs in 264 plate appearances. Right-handers posted a .557 OPS with just four home runs, doing nothing against Madden in 264 plate appearances. Against right-handers, Madden’s mid-90’s fourseamer, much improved in its movement and angle to the plate since draft day, and fearsome hard gyro-spin slider, are absolutely lethal. Against lefties not so much. Manning has tried using his cutter more to jam lefties, but to little success. Mixing in sinkers away or trying to drop a few surprise curveballs in on them hasn’t been effective either. What was required was a much improved changeup.
To that end, Madden has moved to a split-change like so many of the Tigers pitchers without a good circle change have tried over the past two years. He’s also started using the curveball more against left-handers and not just as a change of pace pitch. It too has been effective with that usage. So far, the rebuilt splitter and mixing in more 80 mph curveballs seems to have done the trick. Lefties have a .468 OPS through four outings, while right-handers have a .473 OPS.
You can get a little excited about Madden now. Because it took so much time to figure this out at the Double-A level, I backed away from the most optimistic appraisals of Madden last summer, wanting to see a development just like he’s managed in the early going. So it’s time for me to pipe down and let Ty Madden cook, as they say.
Armed with a pretty effective splitter, at least going by his first four starts, Madden should be very well equipped to handle Toledo, and with even modest command gains on his fastball should be about ready to help out the Tigers rotation by this summer.
In one other bit of news, outfielder Daniel Cabrera, the Tigers 2020 third rounder, has been placed on Erie’s restricted list, presumably to work on some changes outside of game action.