Saturday, February 22

LAKELAND, Fla. -- There’s a delicate balance in young pitchers adding to their arsenal.

Add too many pitches, and hurlers can get indecisive with too many choices on how to attack a hitter. Or worse, they can focus so much on developing one pitch that they lose feel for another. Yet, with all the technology available for measuring spin and movement, pitchers can be missing out if they don’t try to use it to hone their abilities.

When a pitch is developed with a purpose, that’s where the benefit can be worth the effort. For Tigers top prospect Jackson Jobe (No. 5 overall), the quest for more swinging strikes led the 22-year-old to work this offseason on throwing opponents a curve.

“I added a curveball, which is essentially my sweeper with more depth,” Jobe said last week.

Jobe worked on the curveball for much of the offseason at the Pitching WRX facility in Oklahoma City, then some more once he arrived in camp. Thursday morning marked his first time using it against hitters, albeit in live batting practice against teammates Ryan Kreidler, Jace Jung, Trey Sweeney and Wenceel Pérez. Their reactions gave him encouragement.

“I was really happy with the curveball,” Jobe said afterwards. “I was able to land it, was able to get some whiffs on it, got a [strikeout] on it. It really felt good.”

Jobe progressed through the system with an electric arsenal. But it was here a year ago, in Spring Training, that he mentioned one of the big lessons he learned from his first Major League camp: Sometimes the pitch that got you drafted and up the system isn’t the pitch that gets you success in the Majors.

The Tigers drafted Jobe third overall in 2021 on the strength of a high-spin, wipeout slider. When he missed half of the 2023 season with a back injury, he developed a split-changeup with movement that became a big swing-and-miss pitch for him at High-A West Michigan.

Jobe carried that momentum through last season and rode it to the big leagues. But while he was dominant at Double-A Erie, his strikeout rate dropped to 9.9 per nine innings, a trend that continued into his brief tenure at Triple-A Toledo and onto Detroit. The sweeper still rated well in metrics, but didn’t get the results.

“My sweeper looks so good on paper, but then I went out there and no one was really swinging and missing,” Jobe said. “It was a good pitch to get me over.”

That led to the curveball.

“The idea behind the curveball is just to have a bit more of a north-south approach and work off the four-seam [fastball] that I’m throwing 40-plus percent of the time,” Jobe said. “It just gives me a better option.”

Said catcher Jake Rogers: “He was landing it, throwing it for strikes, then below the zone with two strikes. I haven’t caught him a lot, but I told him that was some of the best stuff I’ve seen him have. It was really fun to catch him.”

The swings and misses are the goal with the curveball, more so than the called strikes. By using a pitch with vertical movement, the hope is that he can drop it below some swing paths as hitters gear up for his upper-90s fastball. The key to that, of course, is that it has to coax hitters to swing.

“It’s coming out [of his hand] the same way as the heater,” Rogers said. “It’s not really popping. It’s fooling hitters.”

Jobe threw his session Thursday on the mound at Joker Marchant Stadium so that the Tigers could test out the automated ball-strike challenge system ahead of Grapefruit League play, where it will be used on an experimental basis. Once Jobe gets into a game, we should get a better idea of how his curveball moves thanks to data from Statcast. More importantly, he’ll see how the curveball plays in more competitive situations against opposing hitters.

“We do all this work to get the stuff on the iPad, make the numbers look sexy, but if we can’t put it in the zone then it’s useless,” Jobe said. “So that’s what I’m trying to do.”

Thursday was a good start.

Rogers is nine home runs away from becoming the seventh catcher in Tigers history to hit 50 homers for the franchise. Who was the last Tiger to reach the mark?

A. Alex Avila

B. James McCann

C. Pudge Rodriguez

D. Mickey Tettleton

It takes a unique player to become a catcher. The hours are long, split between working on one’s own hitting while also developing gameplans for pitchers. The physical wear and tear can be brutal, from aching knees to sweating off pounds in catching gear in the summer. It takes a catcher to appreciate it, which is why catchers have a fraternity of sorts.

For Rogers, now the reigning veteran in the Tigers’ catching room, it was important to recognize the fraternity by continuing the tradition of a Spring Training gathering. So he took Tigers catchers, instructors and coaches out to Top Golf in Tampa this week for a night out.

“It’s always a really cool thing,’ Rogers said. “Ever since I’ve been here going back to James McCann [in 2018], we’ve always done a catchers dinner every year. It was cool to get those guys together.”

The group included manager -- and former Tigers catcher -- A.J. Hinch, the most seasoned golfer in the group.

“Jake wanted to get the catchers together,” Hinch said. “It was his idea to get the boys together and enjoy something fun. We usually do a dinner, and then he and I look at each other on who’s going to grab the check. Sometimes he grabs it first; sometimes I grab it first. But I think it’s great that Jake took the initiative to get those guys together, introduce golf to some and challenge others.”

A. Avila

Avila hit 77 home runs during his eight-year Tigers tenure (2009-15, 2017).

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