Kyle Finnegan shows new wrinkles in Tigers debut

There are some reasons to think the Tigers new reliever will be more effective than he was with the Nationals.

Whatever your opinion on the Detroit Tigers’ moves at the trade deadline, picking up RHP Kyle Finnegan was a sound, low-cost idea. While Finnegan isn’t anyone’s idea of a dominant late innings arm, he’s been a modestly successful reliever for four years running, and the Washington Nationals are not anyone’s idea of a great pitching development organization.

The Tigers front office can’t just expect miracles out of Chris Fetter and his staff, or the analytics department, so no one is expecting the 33-year-old right-hander to suddenly emerge as a high-end relief arm. But there are obvious reasons to expect that Finnegan will do significantly better in Detroit, beyond just the obvious fact of getting out of a bottom-feeder NL East franchise after four losing seasons and coming to a contender.

We may have seen the outlines of the plan in his debut on Saturday evening in his Tigers debut against the Phillies .

Chris Brown of Tigers Minor League Report first noted on X that Finnegan threw more sliders against the Phillies on Saturday than he had in any game this season.

Of course, expressed in percentages, that sounds more authoritative than it is. Finnegan threw four sliders against the Phillies out of 18 pitches. Of course, he’d only thrown 24 sliders total in 39 innings this year with Washington, so it did stand out. It’s probably even more notable that he threw less fastballs overall.

Against Nick Castellanos with two outs in the eighth inning, in a dangerous spot after taking over from a struggling Will Vest, Finnegan started him with a slider and a splitter, both thrown for strikes. He then went above the zone with 97 mph for a take. Castellanos fouled off another splitter that was a little down and away in the zone and probably not buried as much as Dillon Dingler wanted it. A slider even further out got the rollover ground ball to third.

Finnegan used the fastball more against right-handed hitter Harrison Bader to open the ninth. He threw three of them, but was generally just trying to stay away from him for strikes after missing with a fastball and a splitter, both down, to open the at-bat. He opened the Otto Kemp at-bat with a slider for a strike and then challenged him with a fastball up and in but still well in the zone for a foul. Two splitters followed.

So, probably two principles are in play. Use your fastball less, and mix in the slider more against right-handed hitters. Nothing too complicated. Most of the top teams have their pitchers using their breaking and offspeed stuff more often, sometimes even more than their fastball, particularly if one of those pitches is the pitcher’s best offering.

Looking through his Statcast data, it was also notable that Finnegan’s four-seam fastball topped out at 20 inches of induced vertical break and averaged 19. His season average is 17 inches of IVB. If you can average 18 or more, you’re getting some really good ride on the fastball.

Finnegan averaged about a half-mph more velo than he usually averages in a game, and may have been a little amped up for his Tigers debut. With more velo usually comes more spin, so it may have just been the extra juice producing more IVB than usual for him. Still, this is the kind of development you expect the Tigers to handle better than most teams, too.

It will be worth watching to see if anything sustainable is going on here. Maybe a grip change, or a slight release cue, or a different spot on the mound. These numbers do vary from pitch to pitch in every game, so it takes time to see if there’s really an average trend developing where Finnegan is consistently getting more ride than not, so don’t get too excited yet.

The non-pitching reasons that Finnegan should do better with the Tigers than his 4.38 ERA and 3.61 FIP might suggest to you are pretty plain. The Tigers are a far better defensive team with the Nationals ranking near the bottom. The Tigers’ catchers are also far superior to the Nationals.

Keibert Ruiz and Riley Adams are among the worst in the league at framing pitches and getting called strikes. Dillon Dingler is among the best and Jake Rogers is still very good as well. The two home parks aren’t all that dissimilar, especially in the summer, so probably that isn’t too much of a difference either way.

For the cost of two decent project arms in Josh Randall and RJ Sales, the Tigers got a reasonably solid reliever in Kyle Finnegan. They also got one with plenty of closing experience, who has some obvious upside in play by coming to Detroit. Hopefully, he can help stabilize a bullpen that has fallen on hard times over the last month.