The right-hander has looked pretty good in his rehab work, but it’s wise to keep expectations in check for now.
In the second half of a mediocre and fairly disappointing 2023 season for the Detroit Tigers , the makings of the team that would break out in 2024 were in place. Tarik Skubal was the best pitcher in the American League after returning from flexor tendon surgery. Spencer Torkelson was hitting a bunch of homers. Riley Greene and Kerry Carpenter were establishing themselves as power hitters. A story that started to develop down the stretch was the emergence of right-hander Sawyer Gipson-Long as a potential part of the rotation.
Former general manager Al Avila made two outstanding trades in the later years of his tenure running the team. The first was getting Reese Olson from the Brewers for the rental of lefty Daniel Norris in 2021. The second came at the deadline in 2022 when Avila flipped starter turned reliever Michael Fulmer to the Minnesota Twins for RHP Sawyer Gipson-Long.
At the time, Gipson-Long was a 24-year-old fringe prospect at the Double-A level who had fastball problems and struggled against left-handed power hitters. He looked like a classic sinkerball type who threw enough strikes to be a depth starter for a major league team stashed at the Triple-A level, but that appeared to be the limit of his potential until the Tigers pitching development staff got a hold of him.
Path to the major leagues
The first move the Tigers made was to switch Gipson-Long to throwing more sinkers, using his rising fourseamer more as an out pitch at the top of the zone or in on the hands of lefties. Secondly, Director of Pitching Gabe Ribas taught him a cutter as another weapon to combat left-handed hitters.
Gipson-Long arrived with several traits the Tigers liked before they even started making adjustments with him. The lanky, six-foot-four right-hander has some of the best extension in the game, averaging nearly a foot more extension to the plate at release. He also had a solid slider and a good changeup already in his tool kit.
Once he’d leaned into using his sinker more, and started mixing in the cutter in on lefties, the whole package became exponentially better. Gipson-Long’s good command did the rest. He adapted to the new pitch mix quickly, and put things together well enough to make his major league debut on September 10, 2023 against the Chicago White Sox .
He was tying up lefties with fourseamers and cutters up and in, and occasionally back-footing them with the slider. At the same time, he would mix in the front hip sinker that started right at the hitter and caught the inner edge of the zone. And then on top of it, his changeup was really good for him, and he alternated pitching inside with throwing that changeup at the outer edge of the strikezone and tailing it away, drawing a lot of bad swings from hitters who were already trained to expect to get jammed a lot.
Gipson-Long had just as much to offer right-handers. He was tying them up with sinkers in and effectively using his slider down and away. As a change of pace he’d buzz the fourseamer up for swing and miss and soft contact, or paint the outer edge when they expected a breaking ball. While he typically topped out at 95 mph, his extension to the plate and the low arm position from a good way down the mound, produced a pretty tough fastball plane to the top of the strike zone. And, when he needed to steal a strike from a hitter he showed some ability to spot the cutter in the corner down and away from them as well. In short, he had a lot of pitches to work with, and the ability to execute most of them to different parts of the zone.
All in all, it was a memorable debut in the major leagues, but certainly a brief one. Still, it’s well worth remembering that while he pitched well in four major league starts, he wasn’t asked to go deep into games, throwing five innings each time. And while his 11 strikeout performance in his second ever major league start against the Angels was an eye-opener, he’s not an overpowering pitcher that we should be looking at as a future frontline starter. He might get there, but for now asking him to just be a solid backend starter with a deep bag of solidly average to above average pitches and the skill to use them, is realistic and much more attainable.
Expectations
That brief run of success was obviously quite short lived. He blew out his elbow after those four starts and underwent UCL reconstruction, and then had surgery to his hip as well. The timing of those surgeries meant that he missed all the 2024 season and was already over a year into his recovery when the Tigers were busy making their first playoff appearance in a decade.
Much like with Casey Mize, Gipson-Long has had plenty of time to rebuild himself and so the usual command issues on returning from Tommy John are less likely to be a problem. Mize returned with more velocity and still had his typically good command. Mize still needed to finally sort out his split-finger fastball and develop a better breaking ball, neither of which happened until he had a full healthy offseason in which to work on improvements rather than just recapturing his full health as a pitcher. Gipson-Long’s command was always a strong component of his game, and his pitch mix was pretty fully developed, so I’m not expecting as much rust as you might with a young starter coming off the surgery and rehab.
In his rehab appearances for the Triple-A Toledo Mud Hens, Gipson-Long hasn’t shown any uptick in velocity yet. Usually a jump in velocity would show up pretty quickly, so I’m still expecting him to sit 92-94 mph, only occasionally reaching back for more. He didn’t use the cutter much in those rehab starts, so we’ll see if that pitch starts to show up more in his mix, or whether he’ll stick mainly with fourseam, sinker, slider, changeup. On the plus side, the stuff and command look good as new so I wouldn’t expect him to be wild in his return either.
Sawyer Gipson-Long is now 27 years old. He’s been out of action for nearly two years, and yet he’s still a rookie at the major league level. Considering all he’s been through to get back, the Tigers will no doubt be pretty careful with his workload. He only threw 53 pitches in his final rehab start with the Mud Hens. So it’s important to keep expectations reasonable here.
When he went down with injury he was a nice little breakout story for a club in need of good news. Now he returns to a young but now more seasoned team leading the whole league and looking to make a deep run in October. If the Tigers didn’t need a little starting help until Reese Olson returns from his finger injury, Gipson-Long would probably be getting 3-4 more starts before the Tigers started figuring out how to work him into the mix.
Hopefully it won’t take long for Gipson-Long to get himself back to the level he’d reached when the injuries bit him. For now, the Tigers will just be looking for solid innings from him to carry them through a rough patch with the rotation. Based on what we saw in Toledo, that shouldn’t be too much to ask.