The former Astros right-hander is rehabbing from Tommy John surgery and won’t return to action until 2026.
The Detroit Tigers have done a good job adding starting pitching in Scott Harris’ first two seasons running the team. The Tigers president of baseball operations got an early start on the 2026 roster on Saturday, inking RHP José Urquidy to a one-year deal worth one million dollars, with a club option for 2026. That option will pay the veteran right-hander $4 million plus performance bonuses based on the number of starts he makes for the Tigers in 2026.
The 29-year-old Urquidy was an international free agent signing by the Astros out of Mexico back in 2015. The right-hander is currently rehabbing from UCL reconstruction surgery he had back in June of 2024. He was signed to take RHP Sawyer Gipson-Long’s spot on the 40-man roster as Gipson-Long moves to the 60-day injured list. Once that move was processed, the Tigers transferred Urquidy to the 60-day injured list as well. He will complete his rehab with the Tigers this season, but isn’t going to return until 2026, so this is the Tigers trying to get a head start on their starting pitching depth for next season.
The right-hander makes for an interesting choice. Urquidy has never been much of a strikeout artist, and he is pretty home run prone. His fourseam fastball has averaged around 93-94 mph in his career, with a solid collection of secondary pitches to back it up. None are really stand out pitches. What Urquidy does well is throw strikes, limit walks, and get an extremely high rate of fly balls. He has a career fly ball rate of 44.6 percent and gets a good amount of pop-ups counted among those fly balls.
Urquidy’s calling card was initially his extremely high in-zone rate early on in his major league career. He didn’t throw quite so many strikes in 2023, adjusting to hitters’ increased aggressiveness against him. His fourseam fastball has a lot of ride and some deception out of his high arm slot. That arm slot is good for his changeup as well, though Urquidy is also a good candidate for a splitter of some sort. With the Tigers teaching a lot of different changeup types these days, that fourseam-offspeed combination is probably where they’re looking to tune him up. Urquidy can spin a breaking ball, and while both his curveball and slider sit close to 80 mph, they have distinct pitch shapes and the difference is hard for hitters to distinguish out of his hand.
One assumes the Tigers really like the fit for both Comerica Park as well as to play off their strong suit defensively. The infield isn’t a very impressive group defensively, but at full power, the Tigers have one of the better outfield defensive groups in the game with Riley Greene in left field and Parker Meadows in center field. Urquidy can put the defense and park to work by collecting a lot of routine outs in the air, making it difficult for opposing teams to do more than move station to station, waiting for the occasional home run.
Urquidy has always outperformed his peripherals holding a career 3.98 ERA against a FIP of 4.71. He gets his share of whiffs but holds a pretty low career strikeout rate of just 19.4 percent. He also gives up a lot of home runs, holding a career average of 1.49 home runs per nine innings. Typically he’s thrived by getting a lot of easy outs and limiting the free passes. Home runs don’t hurt so much when you don’t have anyone else on base.
One would assume the Tigers have some plans to improve Urquidy’s game and keep the ball in the park that go beyond just having a slightly bigger ballpark than in Houston. Either way, compared to signing an Alex Cobb type for around $15 million each year as competition for starting pitching depth gets more fierce with each passing offseason, this is a more efficient way to build in depth in advance for more modest terms. The Tigers will now be able to build up Urquidy their own way and help him make any changes they envision in his pitch shapes/mix, mechanics, and conditioning as he’s recovering.
We’re not going to see him pitching in a Tigers’ uniform for quite some time, but adding Jose Urquidy alongside Sawyer Gipson-Long on the 60-day injured list gives the club long-term depth to look forward to next year, and avoids the pitfalls of having to compete over mediocre depth starters. Should the rehab process not proceed according to plan, the Tigers can simply decline the 2026 option and move on.
The option includes incentives that could boost the total value of the deal to $7 million based on the number of starts he makes in 2026. We’ll see if this turns out to be a prescient move or not, but the cost is negligible enough that there’s really nothing to lose.