The Detroit Tigers spent 2026 watching their rotation fall apart almost as quickly as it came together. What opened the year as a group fronted by Tarik Skubal, Framber Valdez, Jack Flaherty and Justin Verlander never had a chance to stay intact for long.
Verlander made one start before going on the injured list and remaining there until the final game of the season. Skubal was traded at the deadline.
Flaherty missed close to two months with an injury.
That kind of collapse forced Detroit to get a real look at the next wave. Jackson Jobe came back from Tommy John surgery.
River Ryan debuted for the Tigers but only made two starts. Drew Anderson and Keider Montero were pulled in to help patch the rotation.
Still, there’s another arm in the organization who has slipped into the background and shouldn’t be forgotten: Sawyer Olson.
Olson missed the entire 2026 season after undergoing surgery in February to repair the labrum in his right shoulder. That recovery obviously pushed him out of sight, but before the injury hit, he had started carving out a place as a major league starter. His name may not be getting much attention right now, but it should be part of Detroit’s spring training discussion, assuming labor negotiations don’t delay the start of the season.
His track record before the injury gives the Tigers something real to think about. Olson worked three major league seasons from 2023 through 2025, posting a 3.15 ERA with 65 strikeouts over 68 2/3 innings.
Then came the setback. Just 13 games into the 2025 season, disaster struck for the 27-year-old right-hander, ending that year and wiping out 2026 as well.
The latest injury update from MLB.com said Olson had moved into a throwing program, and Detroit expected him to compete for a rotation spot in spring training.
That’s where his case gets interesting. Olson has already shown he can get major league outs, and that matters.
So does the price tag. Compared with chasing another veteran in free agency or trying to swing a trade, he gives the Tigers a much cheaper path.
There are obvious questions, of course. Detroit can’t build its rotation around a hope and a comeback story. Olson still has to show he can handle a starter’s workload, especially since he hasn’t pitched in the majors since 2025 and has never thrown more than 112 1/3 innings in a season.
But if he gets back to his original form and settles in as a dependable starter, that changes the math for the Tigers. It would let them spend elsewhere instead of pouring more resources into the rotation.
Detroit has to make decisions with the information in front of it. Even so, Olson belongs in the conversation heading toward 2027.
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Scott Harris has already signaled that the club intends to push that part of the game more aggressively, and there are players in the system who have shown they can run. The question now is whether Detroit adds more of that element externally, too, with free-agent options offering another path to the kind of small-market edge the Tigers have been missing. [Read more 🡒]