Among the strengths of the Detroit Tigers as Spring Training 2025 opens in Lakeland on Wednesday is certainly their starting pitching. With Jack Flaherty back in the fold, the club enters camp with a really strong trio of reigning AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal, 25-year-old Reese Olson, and Flaherty coming off one of the best seasons of his career. The rotation’s ace in the hole is also the game’s top pitching prospect, right-hander Jackson Jobe.
The 22-year-old Jobe got his feet wet under pressure in September and in the postseason last year, but he wasn’t used as a starting pitcher at the end of a long campaign. Now he enters spring camp looking to win the final spot in the rotation behind veteran Alex Cobb, and he’s sharpening a few new weapons to help him do it.
Without rehashing his complete scouting report from early January, which you can read here, Jobe’s standout issue last year was his struggle to put hitters away with his breaking ball. He got to as many two-strike counts as any starting pitching prospect in the game last year, but posted a pretty average 25.6 percent strikeout rate across the Double-A and Triple-A levels. He’ll need to be better to build on that rate against the best hitters in the world.
As identified in his scouting report, a big part of the issue for him last year was his sweeper. The low-to-mid 80’s breaking ball has been his calling card since the Tigers selected him third overall out of high school in the 2021 amateur draft. Featuring spin rates that routinely top 3000 rpms, which is elite, that pitch combined with Jobe’s outstanding velocity and overall athleticism made him a stud draft prospect.
However, as Jobe himself has opined in interviews this offseason, the sweeper isn’t the weapon it was when pitchers started turning to it in droves five years ago. He also didn’t mince words about his need to put guys away more effectively. Hitters have now seen that horizontal breaking ball more and more, and whiff rates have continued to decline against it overall as it became the pitch de riguer in the amateur and college ranks. In Jobe’s case, it also didn’t really play that well against his riding fourseam fastball.
Instead the high spin rate and the identifiable release out of his hand were too easily spotted in comparison to his fourseam release. Hitters would lay off the pitch even with two strikes, knowing they were unlikely to do anything but foul it off or hit the ball weakly somewhere. Instead of generating whiffs, over time Jobe found himself having to spot it for called third strikes to get punchouts, and minor league umpires often squeezed the pitch badly because there was so much total movement that it’s hard to track.
Jobe and the Tigers knew he needed something with a lot more depth that spun in the opposite direction as his fastball’s backspin, mirroring each other out of the same release tunnel. Enter Jobe’s 12-6 curveball. Clips from his training camp in recent weeks clearly showed him working on the pitch, and as Evan Petzold of the Free Press reported in a nice article on Jobe on Tuesday, he’s not just working on the curve, but also on adding a sinker to his deep catalog of pitches.
He’s always had the ability to throw a curveball, and his ability to spin the ball extremely well translates from the sweeper well. It just wasn’t a pitch he ever seemed to emphasize. Coming to camp this spring, things have changed. Jobe spent a lot of time working on the curve in camp at the Pitching WRX training facility in Oklahoma City this offseason. Tigers second rounder, Owen Hall, also trained there this offseason. Jobe has been with them under coach Alex Marney since his high school days, and the pair got to work in dialing in the curveball this offseason. We can say without hesitation that it looks nasty.
Jobe appears to have shaped the curve with modest adjustment to the sweeper grip and release, because he’s throwing a really hard curveball. At 84-85 mph it’s coming in with his customary 3000+ rpms and huge depth. There aren’t many guys who can rip a curveball that hard, let alone with that much topspin on it. Picking that up against the fourseam release is going to give hitters fits this year as long as the command is there.
The other newer pitch getting a lot more emphasis is the sinker. In training footage released on Tuesday, Jobe is working through both pitches alongside his fourseamer, his cutter, his changeup, and his sweeper. He also tops out at 100.8 mph with the heat, which is particularly outrageous without the adrenaline of a game situation.
The 22-year-old still has plenty of things to refine in his command, but the stuff is off the charts good. Not many pitchers have even two potential plus pitches. Jobe has at least five. He won’t have them in good form all at once very often, but the depth of this arsenal means he’s usually going to have at least a few going good at any given time. That gives him a ton of options to work with, and no doubt Chris Fetter and Jake Rogers will have a good time game-planning against opposing teams with this many high end tools at their disposal.
So, let’s take a moment to think about the full scope of options this presents. Jobe has the fourseamer with great velocity and big hop to the top of the zone, running away arm side only as it reaches the hitting zone. He’s now working on the sinker which doesn’t have the hop, but tails a lot more in on right-hander’s hands with some depth. The changeup, which Jobe will use aggressively against right-handers as well as left-handers, tails arm side with a ton of depth and Jobe sells it well with arm speed and aggression. That was his clear number two offering in 2024. Those are his arm side moving pitches.
Then we have the breaking stuff down and to his glove side. The curveball looks like the high fourseamer out of his hand but spins the opposite way with excellent 12-6 depth and a little tilt when he wants it. He’s still got the ability to sweep breaking balls all the way across the zone. And finally the cutter is basically a hard slider at 90-91 mph that he can jam lefties with and get right-handers flailing as it cuts and sinks away from them.
Jobe needs a good camp to win the starting job this spring, and because he missed some time last year with a hamstring strain, he’s still going to have his innings closely monitored and his workload kept in check. As camp opens, he’s still at the starting point in his major league career. There is plenty left to do to refine his command of these pitches to the point that he has several going well at any given time, but this is just an outrageous collection of stuff in his toolbox.
The Tigers will keep in mind Jobe’s potential to win Rookie of the Year this season. Should he do so, the Tigers will get an extra compensation pick in the 2026 amateur draft. As Jobe told the Days of Roar podcast last month, he’s aware of that and would love to benefit the whole organization by getting that done. To be eligible, he needs to accrue a full year of service time and then win the AL Rookie of the Year as well. This would be nice, but of course the goal, to paraphrase Jobe, is to win the World Series over individual awards.
The Tigers aren’t going to press him in hopes of him winning the award. His long-term success is what matters. But it does at least color the decision-making should Jobe have a good camp and be clearly one of the club’s five best options to start the season in the rotation. In the past, teams would often try to game service time to get an extra year of team control, or perhaps also out of an excess of caution with a young player. The Tigers will want to do what is best for Jobe as well as for the team, but that extra incentive makes it easier to put him in the rotation on Opening Day as long as he earns the job in spring camp.
We’re very interested to see him add the curveball and the sinker to his repertoire of weapons and to watch how the Tigers pitching brain trust deploys everything against different types of hitters this spring. Best laid plans can go wildly awry in spring camp and early in the season, but at least on paper the rotation is in outstanding shape. If Jackson Jobe can take the next step with his command, this group has a fair chance to be the best rotation in baseball.