Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- Reid Detmer's numbers tell two very different stories depending on which advanced metric you use.
- Experts see him as a top-tier trade chip despite surface-level stats that paint a mediocre picture.
- A fresh developmental approach could unlock sustained ace-level performance from this still-young arm before the deadline.
If you want him to be, Reid Detmers is a teaching tape in how to lie with statistics. Here’s what I mean:
Many people probably have not heard of Reid Detmers, owing to the fact that, well, he’s on the Los Angeles Angels. And perusing Detmers’ Baseball-Reference page, you would come away with one conclusion: he is a mediocre starting pitcher on a terrible team with a 3-6 record, a 4.13 ERA and 1.5 Wins Above Replacement, good for 60th on the bWAR pitcher rankings.
However, if you head over to FanGraphs, you will find that Detmers has almost twice as much fWAR — 2.9, seventh in all of Major League Baseball among pitchers. Wins, ERA and WAR are probably the three stats that most people use to decide if a pitcher is good or not, and Google Search results and ESPN sites all return the 1.5 bWAR figure. So the party line is this: Detmers is a mediocre starting pitcher on the Angels.
Reid Detmers is a polarizing analytics case
Ok, guy, then why do Kiley McDaniel and Jeff Passan think he’s the sixth most valuable trade candidate and the third most valuable pitcher behind pitching gods Tarik Skubal and Joe Ryan? Are they just fWAR enjoyers like much of the pitcher-evaluating public? Do they know something we don’t? Does Detmers have access to the Captain America super soldier serum and he’s going to use it once he gets traded?
The answer is probably, probably, and, uh, no on the super solider serum ... I think. But Detmers is definitely not a mediocre pitcher; he’s good, and could be good for a long time for the team that can unlock him. Only one day past his 27th birthday, Detmers could command a massive return for a market that clearly respects what he actually is, rather than what he appears to be on the surface.
Detmers is the perfect example of why baseball analytics remains an inexact science; despite literal decades of refinement and grassroots research, we still have guys who are twice as good depending on which WAR you prefer. For pitchers, bWAR (which has Detmers at the pedestrian 1.5) is based on RA9 (runs allowed per nine innings), which includes both earned and unearned runs.
It’s corrected for all sorts of stuff, but fWAR echews RA9 in favor of a FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) based calculation, which removes anything a pitcher cannot control. Personally, I think fWAR is much better for projecting pitcher performance since runs can happen for any number of absurd, pitcher-agnostic reason. RA9 doesn’t even exclude unearned runs.
Detmers is much better than his counting stats suggest
But there’s more to Detmers than a WAR war (see what I did there?). He's a strikeout machine, fourth in the majors, and is also a down-and-out underlying metrics master, with one of the starkest differences between his expected ERA and his actual ERA. That could be for a number of complicated reasons, but Detmers’ has consistently produced excellent contact quality that simply should not lead to the number of runs it has.
That doesn’t mean the Angels are constantly committing errors since these are earned runs, but errors are a shakily counted stat, with lots of things a regular viewer would consider an error often counted as not. The Angels’ defense is eighth-worst in Defensive Runs Saved, so there might be something to that.
The Angels also haven’t exactly helped Detmers’ development, moving him to the bullpen in 2025 for unclear reasons. A new team with a … uh, let’s just say different developmental approach might be the key to Detmers’ abilities. He’s pretty young as far as starting pitchers go, and has shown a clear ability to improve his arsenal. In terms of pitch-level data, Detmers has been getting cash money out of his slider which is waaaay up in run value at 12. He’s taken some speed off his fastballs and has been throwing more sliders and changeups with half as many curveballs. This isn’t some flukey home run-luck based Linsanity run: there is real evidence Detmers is figuring something out.
Will the Angels actually trade him? That’s a harder question, and I will refer you to McDaniel and Passan again (who know stuff I don’t) saying that he has a 20 percent chance of being traded. With two-and-a-half years of control remaining on his contract, it seems possible (if perhaps even likely) that the Angels keep Detmers for some reason, a team that has repeatedly refused to trade their good players cough cough Shohei Ohtani cough cough Mike Trout.
But Detmers fits the timeline of basically every team in the majors, so if the Angels tell everyone to bring their offers, they could get a serious bidding war price. 27-year-old starters who steadily improve their stuff are what you want to invest in; personally, I would get investing.
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