Can the Detroit Tigers depend on Tyler Holton in 2026?

I spent a fair amount of time last year pretty concerned with the Detroit Tigers left-handed options in the bullpen. Too much time, as it turned out. While Tyler Holton had a tough year compared to his 2023-2024 performance and Brant Hurter went through a rough stretch of his own, the Tigers relievers handled left-handed hitters alright for the most part. They allowed a .315 wOBA, which was right at league averages. Still, Holton’s peripheral numbers were pretty bleak, and while he outperformed them in terms of his ERA as usual, there’s a clear weakness on that side of the bullpen.

Holton has always been a little light in the strikeout department, particularly for a reliever. He’s thrived anyway by absolutely refusing to walk anyone while still doing a good job limiting home runs. That latter ability collapsed in 2025 as he allowed a 1.72 HR/9 mark that was roughly double his 2023-2024 home run rate.

There’s also the question of his workload over the last three seasons. He’s thrown 258 1/3 innings over the last three years, which is a lot of lifting for a reliever. While he’s made some spot starts that throw a wrench into trying to compare against all other relievers, Holton is clearly near the top of the major leagues in terms of his volume of innings by any pitcher who is typically working as a relief pitcher.

There’s some mitigation to that workload in the fact that Holton doesn’t throw hard at all and doesn’t rely on velocity. He averaged 92 mph with his fourseamer and 91.4 mph with his sinker in 2025, which is right in line with his averages in previous seasons. No red flag there. Instead, it’s his precise command and ability to mix both fastball types with cutters, sweeping sliders, and changeups depending on batter handedness to manage contact.

His strikeout rate has dipped roughly a percentage point each of the past two seasons, and his swinging strike rate has likewise declined just a tiny bit, but with outstanding low walk rates, his ratio of strikeouts to walks has remained pretty strong as well, just not quite as strong as in 2023-2024. So the underlying performance has declined each season in Detroit, but to such small degrees that it’s hard to be hugely concerned about it.

Something we’ll have to wait and see on, is whether the ABS challenge system hurts or helps a pitcher like Tyler Holton. There’s a vague prevailing view that guys with really nasty swing and miss stuff will be more valuable, while pitch to contact guys will struggle, but at this point that’s just guesswork, at least for pitch to contact guys like Holton with truly elite command. The challenge system should open up the corners of the strike zone for more called strikes, even if a challenge is required to get them called properly. That may well balance out or even prove more important that whether a pitcher’s heater or breaking stuff can generate a lot of whiffs in the strike zone.

Either way, there’s just no way to know and I don’t think Triple-A numbers are any help, as the reason most pitchers are at that level in the first place is a lack of major league command, not pure stuff. They just aren’t capable of testing the hypothesis to anywhere near the degree a pitcher like Holton can.

So, the only thing chipping away at confidence in Holton’s future performance is that big spike in home runs.

As you’d expect, the trouble came from right-handed hitters exclusively so we’ll leave lefties out of the equation. He has no issues there. Holton gave up 11 homers to right-handers in 2025, producing a disastrous 2.38 HR/9 and allowing a .500 slugging percentage to them. In 2024, he allowed just four homers to them despite facing more hitters overall, and held them to a meager .290 slugging percentage. The same was generally true in 2023.

Holton doesn’t use his sinker against right-handed hitters. Instead he uses his cutter as his primary pitch, throwing it 51.6 percent of the time to them, and then fading his changeup down and away from them. He used his fourseamer 16.7 percent of the time against right-handed hitters but it’s many as a change of pace pitch up in the zone.

All three were hit much harder in 2025. He gave up an outrageous .476 ISO against the fourseamer, a poor ISO of .192 against the cutter, and an equally poor .222 ISO against the changeup. All three pitches also lost just a little bit of movement overall in 2025, but nothing so catastrophic as to be obvious, and because all four pitches were hit much harder, we’re unfortunately going to have to chalk this up to less consistently sharp command.

A most unsatisfying answer.

If one pitch falls apart, you have a culprit. Maybe the pitch could be improved, or Holton could change his usage patterns, etc. When all three offerings to right-handers are just slightly worse in terms of overall movement profile, but the results are drastically worse, well, Tyler Holton has always walked a tightrope with mediocre stuff that relies on truly elite command, and at certain points this season he just didn’t quite have it working.

So the Tigers have a question to answer. Holton has posted ERA/FIP combinations of 2.11/3.56, 2.19/3.17, and 3.66/4.64 over the past three years. If even a small falloff in actual performance can lead to a major change in his numbers like that, how much can they rely on him going forward, particularly as a high leverage reliever?

Holton certainly still has his uses. A 3.66 ERA over 78 2/3 innings would be just dandy for a part-time starter. He can handle multiple innings, he dominates lefties, and he can spot start for you in a pinch. It’s just very hard to keep relying on him as your lefty stopper holding leads in the late innings, because there’s just a fine line for him between the elite command he needs, and the very good command he showed in 2025. That slight falloff produced a major change in his utility for the team.

In his favor perhaps, is the fact that most of the bad work happened in June and August. The rest of the year, including the postseason, he was his usual dominant self, and the type of pitcher who drives opposing fanbases crazy. “Why can’t they hit this guy?”

So Tyler Holton is well worth keeping. But what’s also clear is that the Tigers need another contingency plan for the late innings. They can’t just assume that Holton will get back to handling right-handed hitters as well as he does lefties. Right now, Will Vest is the only high leverage reliever they can really trust in all scenarios.

Whether the move is to bring back a splitter heavy right-handed reliever like Kyle Finnegan, or pursuing a more high-powered swing and miss lefty, or ideally both, the back of the bullpen needs some real punch added this offseason. If they do that, they should be in good shape. If they do that and then Holton gets back on course against right-handed hitting, they may finally have a dominant bullpen that can carry them a long way in the regular season and beyond.