Detroit fans are very intelligent. I don’t know if that many tiger people came to the defense of Framber Valdez last night. It really was an ugly moment. It was bad enough that the Tigers really needed Valdez to go out and pitch some good baseball, and he ended up having one of the worst starts of his career. But teams lose games every day, for Valdez to go out of his way to put Detroit at the center of a whole lot of controversy made things even weaker.
I think there are many Tiger fans out there right now, understandably wondering how the hell Detroit is going to be able to cobble together a pitching staff now that they have basically their entire opening day rotation sidelined outside of Jack Flaherty, who’s been awful to start this season. I can't give you an honest answer. You can expect a whole lot of pitching chaos. I don’t even know if I can go as far as to call it. Chaos at this point. It’s more so pitching desperation. Detroit never expected to have a pitching staff this depleted at any point, let alone this early in the season.
I don’t have a problem with Valdez‘s suspension here. Anytime you intentionally throw a pitch at somebody, it is bound to result in some issues. But I don’t really understand suspending AJ Hinch for a game. I got zero indication that AJ condoned Framber's stupidity, and was pretty open after the fact about what an ugly optics look it was. I felt like suspending the skipper is overkill, but I can’t imagine that AJ is going to fight it.
Valdez just made an already complicated situation even more complicated. What people in the media say is probably noise he plans to block out, but these actions have now impacted his team. For better or for worse, Detroit needs Framber out there to give them innings right now, and at least for one start, he’s not going to be able to provide them.