Injuries have crushed Flores’ value over the last two seasons. He’s running out of time to turn things around.
While the Detroit Tigers have become known as one of the top development teams for pitching over the last few years, no one has a perfect track record. Perhaps the most disappointing development in the system over the past two years has been the fall of right-hander Wilmer Flores.
The Tigers signed Flores, younger brother of the long-time Giants infielder of the same name, as an undrafted free agent after the short, five round, 2020 amateur draft. The Venezuelan was just 19 years old at the time, with only a season at Arizona Western college. That was a bad year to sign, particularly as a JUCO, and he received just a $20,000 bonus. Initial returns at A-ball were excellent, and he absolutely dominated High-A to start the 2022 season, but it was his outstanding campaign after jumping up to the Double-A Erie SeaWolves in May of 2022 that really sent his stock soaring.
Flores was pumping 96-99 mph with good life and extension, backing it with a good wipeout curveball and a hard cutter that functioned as a harder breaking ball. Facing significantly older, more experienced competition, Flores posted a 27.5 strikeout rate against a 6.1 percent walk rate, and kept the hard contact under control. While the system was a lot weaker then, Flores was our top ranked prospect entering the 2023 season. There were certainly concerns about his aggressive, high-effort delivery, but even with a lot of relief risk, Flores was undeniably one of the top pitchers at the level in 2022, and one of the youngest as well.
Since that point, just about everything has gone wrong. Flores has gone from forearm soreness, to shoulder inflammation in 2023, which prompted the Tigers to talk to him about moving to the bullpen. They did move him to relief in 2024, but he dealt with a right shoulder sprain that limited him to 20 appearances as his control fell apart entirely. The shoulder issues haven’t resolved, and he needed another injection this January and is still rehabbing to return sometime later this spring. If he can finally put the shoulder problems behind him, he’ll then face the task of earning a promotion out of the Toledo Mud Hens bullpen, but he’s got to get back into consistent action to even start moving in the right direction again.
From the start, Wilmer Flores was an extremely aggressive pitcher. There were shades of Michael Fulmer’s Double-A campaign prior to his 2016 breakout in Flores dominant fastball and willingness to pound hitters inside. The six-foot-four, 225 pound right-hander was big and mean, coming down the mound with bad intentions. His long arms and aggressive drive to plate always left some concern about him developing his command further, but he was already filling up the strike zone with 95-99 mph gas and snapping off a sharp breaking ball when he was only 20 years old.
The velocity appears to be largely intact. Flores hit 100 mph last spring with the Toledo Mud Hens, and averaged 95.8 mph even as the shoulder began barking in April and May. Combined with his seven foot, four inch extension to the plate, and you have a really big fastball there.
Flores’ high arm slot produces a cutterish fourseam fastball, somewhat reminiscent of Matt Manning’s but with more velocity and extension. Flores is not a pronator at all, and everything he throws naturally moves glove side. He can add a little tail to the fastball if he’s trying to jam a right-handed hitter, but it’s typically a straight riding fourseamer with a little late movement. Hitters don’t see many fastballs like it, so while “straight” may sound like a bad thing, in this case it’s a real outlier heater and breaks a lot of bats even when hitters are on time. When he’s been healthy, he gets a fair amount of whiffs on it, and rarely do hitters drive it hard in the air.
His main breaking ball used to be a curveball that typically has around 2700 rpms of spin. At his best he was throwing it around 82-83 mph with really nasty wipeout break that started up in the zone and could end up in the dirt. Since the injury trouble began, it hasn’t been as consistently sharp or as hard, averaging just under 80 mph in 2024. As a result he isn’t throwing it as often either, and the slider has taken over as the main secondary weapon.
Early in his pro career, he was throwing a high-80’s cutter which he and the Tigers reshaped into more of a prototypical slider at 86-87 mph. In 2024, that velocity averaged 84.5 mph, whether by design or again as part of the ongoing shoulder trouble. He still posted a 34.6 percent whiff rate at the Triple-A level last year with it, and particularly as a reliever that is now the primary breaking ball. He’ll use the curve more as a change of pace to left-handers. Work on a split-changeup was abandoned last year, and that project may have been permanently scrapped.
Flores has all you could ask for in a high-powered, closer type reliever. What he hasn’t had is the health to stay on the mound and continue tuning his fastball command. Instead, he’s battled the shoulder and struggled to locate his fastball consistently. The equation is pretty simple. If he can get right, the Tigers may well have a really dominant reliever here. however, after two seasons of struggles and shoulder trouble that didn’t resolve over the offseason, in part leading to the Tigers declining to protect him from the Rule 5 draft last fall, the situation is getting a little dire at this point.
2025 Outlook
You can probably shake your Magic 8-ball and get as accurate a prediction as anyone else can provide for Flores. Mine keeps saying “Outlook not so good” and that’s about as good an answer as we’re going to get.
He received a platelet rich injection in his throwing shoulder in January, and continues to rehab in spring camp. There are no expectations of his getting into games anytime soon. This may start to smack of the Franklin Perez saga, but in that case the Tigers’ hapless player development leadership at the time needed four years just to get a proper diagnosis despite Perez never pitching more than a few innings at a time before getting shut down again. The current staff won’t make those kinds of egregious mistakes. There are some improvements he could make in his stride and leg block that might take a little pressure off the shoulder, but it’s likely at this point that some kind of surgery is going to be required if this latest attempt at rehab doesn’t finally get his shoulder trouble resolved.
News of the injection came out only at the beginning of spring camp, but we probably would still have ranked Flores around this spot either way. The potential is still quite good, but while elbow injuries are regularly overcome, ongoing shoulder trouble is a lot more complicated beast to deal with, reflecting the complexity of the joint as compared to the common UCL issues in pitchers’ elbows.
The Tigers will take it slow with Wilmer Flores this spring, and I wouldn’t expect to see him pitching for the Mud Hens until late May or into June even in the more optimistic scenarios. He really needs a change of fortune this season. Hopefully they can finally get him right, because he still has the potential to be a heck of a good reliever for the Tigers in the long term.