Alex Cobb signed a one year, $15 million deal with the Tigers earlier this week. Many Tigers fans were… distressed by Cobb being their team’s potentially biggest signing following a playoff berth. TigersJUK eloquently articulated how he and his fellow fans could be feeling.
All jokes aside, there’s a good chance Cobb still has something left in the tank and that’s more than you can ask for when signing a pitcher for significantly less than others are being offered in the same free agent market.
Here, I’m going to talk about who Cobb is as a pitcher, what the Tigers might see in him, and how the move impacts his outlook for fantasy baseball.
How Good is Alex Cobb?
Durability rather than ineffectiveness has often been Cobb’s bugaboo. He hasn’t thrown 160 innings in a single season since all the way back in 2017 and missed nearly all of 2024 after undergoing surgery on his left hip.
He’s also missed time for his back, neck, groin, fingernail, and shoulder over the last few seasons. That’s a true laundry list of ailments for a 37-year-old and it’s unlikely the Tigers signed him to be an innings-eater type.
Yet, Cobb did throw 301 innings over his two seasons with the Giants and performed well overall with a 3.80 ERA, 3.48 SIERA, 22.1 K%, and 6.3 BB%. His ground ball rate was also an astounding 59.4% those two years, in line with his 61.2 GB% in a small sample last season.
The Tigers have proven to be creative with their pitchers’ workloads and that version of Cobb – with slightly fewer innings – would be an effective and valuable piece.
How Good can Cobb be
The question is, can Cobb be as good as he was two years ago? He logged just 22 innings with the Guardians last season across five starts between the regular and postseason. Without much to work off of, he did show some traits and tendencies that tell me there’s still a solid pitcher here.
First off, it’s monumentally important that Cobb made it back at all and was entrusted with two playoff starts. Missing the entire season with his combination of injuries and the potential for an irregular offseason would’ve crushed his market and left us with plenty of doubt for his future.
With that, his velocity was back to its 2023 level in those playoff starts. They were abbreviated though – only 41 and 65 pitches, respectively – so it shouldn’t be surprising that Cobb could dial it up there.
However, his fastball sat above than 94 MPH in his last regular season start as well and he had…