Tigers Reported Ready to Sign Mike Pelfrey

According to Jon Heyman at CBS Sports . com, anyway.

On first glance, this is a gigantic so-what.  Pelfrey will be 32 years old when spring training opens next year.  He's had two pretty good years, where he accumulated a combined 5.7 WARP (wins over replacement player); unfortunately, those years were 2008 and 2010.  Over the last five seasons, he's had a combined 1.6 WARP, and 1.4 of that was last year, when he won 6 games, lost 11, and put up a 4.26 ERA for the Twins.  Frankly, this is a guy that I would be looking at after most of the dust has settled in the winter market, not early on.

Perhaps Detroit, having already signed Jordan Zimmerman, is looking to finish up its starting rotation.  However, Detroit's problem last year was, aside from the now-departed David Price, they got a decent (although not spectacular) year out of Justin Verlander, and a lot of lousy out of everybody else.  The team's starting pitching finished dead last in the majors with a -8.1 WARP, after having finished second in the majors in 2014 at 7.4 WARP (behind the Washington Nationals, who also dropped last year, but not by anywhere near that much).  No Detroit pitcher, other than Price and Verlander, who started more than five games had a WARP above 0.1.  They lost Max Scherzer and Rick Porcello from the 2014 team (Scherzer was still excellent last year, Porcello was not), but Anibal Sanchez and Alfredo Simon, who were expected to be good again last year, both tanked.

Detroit has got to fix this if they have any hope to contend (which is going to be hard in a division that features the World Series champion Kansas City Royals and the steadily-improving Cleveland Indians and Minnesota Twins); the problem is Zimmerman and Pelfrey may not be anywhere near enough.  I guess the thinking is Pelfrey will be a lock to be decent, but I don't see a lot of evidence to make that guarantee.

Here's Pelfrey's stats at Baseball Reference.