Tigers reportedly lean toward Anderson over Jansen in $10MM option calls

What happened

Detroit faces a pair of club option decisions that must be resolved within five days of the World Series concluding, per Anthony Franco at MLB Trade Rumors. Both involve pitchers who would be due eight-figure salaries: Kenley Jansen, a future Hall of Fame closer, and Drew Anderson, a journeyman reliever-turned-spot-starter who spent five years pitching in Japan and Korea between MLB stints. The Tigers hold a net $10MM call on each pitcher. Despite the considerable gap in career pedigree, Franco reports it is Anderson who stands the better chance of receiving a second season in Detroit.

Why it matters

The operational logic, as Franco lays it out, is coherent — even if the framing takes a moment to settle. A franchise weighing whether to pay $10MM to a future Hall of Fame closer and concluding the journeyman might be the safer investment is, at minimum, a sentence that earns a second read.

Anderson arrived last December on a one-year, $7MM deal that included the $10MM club option for next season with no buyout attached. He was initially expected to compete for a rotation spot, but the additions of Framber Valdez and Justin Verlander pushed him into long relief before the season began. That is a meaningful piece of context: Anderson's role was shaped by the roster around him, not solely by his own performance.

His early-season work was uneven. Jansen, Will Vest, Kyle Finnegan, and Brant Hurter — before Hurter's back injury in late May — all drew larger assignments in the bullpen hierarchy. Anderson mixed high-leverage appearances with mop-up duty, the kind of usage pattern that tends to obscure what a pitcher actually is. As Franco notes, an eight-figure salary for a medium-leverage reliever is a little rich.

What changed the calculus was the deadline. After the trades of Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize, Anderson moved into the rotation for his final nine appearances. That stretch, and what it revealed about his arsenal, is the core of the option argument.

The numbers

Anderson's final nine starts produced a 2.84 ERA across 44 1/3 innings, per Franco's reporting. The peripherals were less tidy: a 20% strikeout rate and an 11% walk rate in that stretch, home runs allowed at a higher-than-average clip, and limited success turning a lineup over more than twice. Opponents who faced Anderson a third time went 9-22 with two home runs and two doubles apiece — a small sample, but a directional signal worth noting.

The broader season picture is more encouraging. Anderson averaged 95 mph on his fastball and generated swing-and-miss with his curveball and a kick-changeup he developed while pitching for the SSG Landers in Korea. Working out of the bullpen, he struck out nearly 27% of opponents. Across the full season, he fanned a quarter of batters faced and combined for 108 innings of 3.67 ERA ball, per Franco.

That is a meaningful workload for a pitcher who entered the year without a guaranteed rotation spot. The kick-changeup, in particular, is the kind of pitch that tends to make evaluators lean forward — a weapon honed over years of work abroad, now showing up in a major-league context with results attached to it.

Where the club stands

The Tigers finished 76-86 (.469), sitting fourth in the AL Central and nine games back. They enter the offseason eight games below the Wild Card cut line, with a one-game losing streak to close the year, and have been eliminated from both the division race and the Wild Card race. The front office is now in full offseason mode, and the option clock is already running.

The rotation picture is notably different from where it stood at the start of the season. Skubal and Mize were dealt at the deadline, and Skubal is already being discussed as the headliner of the 2026-27 free agent starting pitcher class, per earlier Posterior Wire reporting — a two-time AL Cy Young winner who returned from elbow surgery and finished the season in dominant form. Verlander and Valdez remain, but the back end of the staff is genuinely unsettled. That context makes Anderson's late-season rotation work more relevant than it might appear in isolation.

A 76-86 finish and elimination from both races means these option decisions are being made in a pure roster-construction context, without the pressure of a playoff chase distorting the math. That is, in its own way, clarifying: the question is simply whether each pitcher fits what Detroit is trying to build, at the price the option demands.

What we don't know yet

The option decisions have not been announced. Franco's reporting frames Anderson as the more likely candidate to return, but that is an assessment of probability, not a club announcement. Nothing in the material indicates Detroit has communicated a decision in either direction on either pitcher.

The Jansen side of the ledger is notably thin on detail in Franco's piece. The reporting establishes that Detroit holds a $10MM option on him and that Anderson is the likelier keep — but the specific reasoning behind any potential decision on Jansen is not laid out. Whether the club views him as a closer, a setup option, or simply a salary figure that does not fit the current roster math is not addressed in the material.

It is also worth noting that Anderson's option carries no buyout. That structure matters: declining the option costs Detroit nothing beyond the decision itself, which removes one of the usual friction points in these calls. Whether that clean exit makes the option more or less likely to be exercised is a question the reporting leaves open.

What to watch

The five-day window after the World Series ends is the operative deadline. Both decisions will need to be made in that window, per Franco. If Detroit picks up Anderson's option, the next question becomes how the club intends to use him — as a rotation piece, a high-leverage reliever, or the kind of swing-arm hybrid his 2026 season suggested he could be.

The kick-changeup and the 95 mph fastball are the tools that make the $10MM conversation plausible at all. Whether Detroit's front office agrees that a full season of development — in a defined role, with a clearer place in the staff hierarchy — could unlock more of what Anderson showed in those final nine starts is the judgment call at the center of this decision.

On the Jansen side, the relative quiet in Franco's reporting is its own signal worth monitoring. A future Hall of Fame closer on a team that finished 76-86, with a rotation that lost two of its top arms at the deadline, is a roster puzzle without an obvious answer in the material. Watch for any club communication once the World Series concludes and the five-day clock begins.