Tigers adding Maeda on two-yea...

The Tigers found the veteran starter they wanted with a familiar foe from the other side of the division. Right-hander Kenta Maeda, whose four-year tenure with the Twins included several stingy performances against the Tigers, is headed to Detroit after reaching agreement on a two-year contract, sources told MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand and Jon Morosi.

The Tigers have not confirmed the reported $24 million deal, which is pending a physical.

The addition fits the kind of short-term deal that has worked well for Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris in his time signing players between Detroit and his previous stint as Giants general manager. It’s also a sign of belief in the upside of the 35-year-old Maeda, whose return this past season from Tommy John surgery showed strong underlying numbers beyond his 6-8 record and 4.23 ERA over 21 games for Minnesota.

Though Maeda suffered a sub-.500 record for the second time in his seven-year Major League career, he allowed 94 hits over 104 1/3 innings with 28 walks and 117 strikeouts. His rates of 2.4 walks and 10.1 strikeouts per nine innings were better than his career averages and ranked among the top quarter of MLB pitchers, according to Statcast, while his 8.1 hits per nine innings ranked slightly worse than his career 7.7 H/9. His expected ERA of 3.77 -- based on the quality and quantity of contact against him -- ranked in the top third among MLB hurlers.

The Tigers saw Maeda’s post-surgery repertoire first-hand in three meetings last season. After a right triceps strain in late April sidelined him for two months, he returned from the injured list on June 23 at Comerica Park with five scoreless innings on three hits -- all singles -- with two walks and eight strikeouts, including five of his 11 swings and misses off the splitter and half of his 14 called strikes on sliders. He took a hard-luck loss in Detroit on Aug. 10 with six innings of three-hit, one-run ball, with a Riley Greene homer off Maeda’s slider accounting for the damage. The Tigers hit him around for three runs on seven hits in four innings six days later in Minnesota, including homers from Greene and Spencer Torkelson.

“There were some pitches that I came back in [to the clubhouse] and looked at them, and they were right on the white line [of the strike zone],” Greene said after the Aug. 10 outing. “He was really good.”

Set to turn 36 just after Opening Day in 2024, Maeda is still finding ways to tinker with his arsenal. When Maeda first came to the Majors in '16, he was throwing each of his half-dozen pitches at least 10 percent of the time. In '23, Maeda had slowly simplified that approach where three different pitches -- his splitter, slider and four-seamer -- were thrown at least 25 percent of the time. With a 31.9-percent usage, Maeda’s splitter became his most-used pitch for the first time in his career.

“He doesn’t throw a ton of fastballs,” manager A.J. Hinch said after Maeda’s June gem, “so you’re going to have to be disciplined to his split-slider combo. And all of our guys had a hard time handling those pitches.”

Opposing hitters batted just .182 off Maeda’s splitter this past season with a 35 percent strikeout rate, both in line with previous success Maeda had with the pitch. By contrast, Maeda’s slider -- his most heavily-used pitch in 2020 and 2021 -- was a bit worse, with 10 home runs allowed, a .550 slugging percentage and a 27.6 percent whiff rate, the lowest strikeout rate he has posted with that pitch for his career. Spending his second season back from Tommy John surgery working with the Tigers’ pitching instruction group could help get that pitch back to his previous standards.

In the process, a successful tenure and good experience for Maeda could open new opportunities for the Tigers. Maeda, who became a star in his native Japan before signing with the Dodgers in 2016, is the first prominent Japanese pitcher to sign with Detroit since Hideo Nomo spent the 2000 season in the Tigers rotation. The team pursued select players since then with no success.

Maeda would be by far the oldest member of the Tigers rotation barring any additional signings, joining 20-somethings Tarik Skubal, Matt Manning, Casey Mize, Reese Olson, Joey Wentz, Alex Faedo and Sawyer Gipson-Long. The previous reigning veteran in Detroit’s rotation, Eduardo Rodriguez, is a free agent after opting out of his contract at the start of the offseason.