13 players who recently left Detroit and had more success with other teams

Matthew Stafford, Justin Verlander aren’t only former Detroit athletes thriving

DETROIT – It always hurts to watch a player leave your favorite team and thrive elsewhere — something Detroit sports fans have become accustomed to the last several years.

We’re not talking about someone like Anibal Sanchez, who had his best seasons in Detroit before winning a late World Series in Washington, or Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who got carried to a championship by LeBron James and Anthony Davis.

No, this is reserved for players who left Detroit and truly found greener pastures, both in terms of personal and team achievement.

Let’s dive head first into the pain, starting with the most obvious and recent inductee.

Matthew Stafford

• When he left: March 2021
• How he left: Traded to Los Angeles Rams

Everybody knows the story with Stafford in Detroit. A small fraction of the franchise’s struggles fell on his shoulders, but by and large, Stafford was one of the few reasons the team even stayed afloat during the 2010s. Most agree that the Lions were an embarrassment in spite of — not due to — their talented quarterback.

He finished his Lions career with nearly 50,000 passing yards and 300 touchdowns, but could never quite secure that elusive playoff win, going 0-3 in three wildcard rounds.

Well, in his first year since being traded away from the team that drafted him No. 1 overall, Stafford won a division title, hosted a playoff game and picked up his first victory. His Rams are headed to the divisional round, and Stafford has finally taken a huge weight off his shoulders.

Pretty much everyone in Detroit is happy for Stafford because he represented the franchise well on and off the field. But it’s still a gut punch for Lions fans to know their team wasted 12 years with a quarterback who was good enough to win a playoff game.

Justin Verlander

• When he left: August 2017
• How he left: Traded to Houston Astros

The only other player whose situation compares to Stafford’s in this regard is Verlander, though there are some key differences.

For one, Verlander helped lead the Tigers to two World Series appearances. In general, the 2006-2013 era Tigers are remembered as a success.

Verlander also won two Cy Young awards and an MVP. While a vocal minority of Lions fans still argue against Stafford’s abilities, nobody will deny Verlander is a future Hall of Famer.

But still, the similarities remain. Both Stafford and Verlander were the faces of Detroit franchises for more than a decade, and neither could win a championship despite many personal achievements.

When the Tigers traded Verlander to the Houston Astros, it took just two months for him to win a World Series. In two and a half seasons with the Astros, despite being in his mid-30s, Verlander has been better than he ever was in Detroit (yes, counting his MVP season).

Since the trade, Verlander has started 74 games, posting a 2.45 ERA, 3.04 FIP and 0.834 WHIP. He’s struck out 12.1 batters per nine innings while walking just 1.6. Those numbers are ludicrous.

During his MVP season in 2011, Verlander posted a 2.40 ERA, 2.99 FIP and 0.920 WHIP with nine strikeouts and two walks per nine innings. He gave up essentially the same number of runs, on average, but allowed more base runners and had fewer strikeouts (even accounting for how the offensive approach has changed league-wide since then).

There’s no debate: Verlander will go into the Hall of Fame as a Tiger because he spent the vast majority of his career in Detroit (380 of 454 games so far). But he’s found another gear since leaving.

Max Scherzer

• When he left: October 2014
• How he left: Free agency

It’s impossible to mention Verlander without immediately pivoting to Scherzer, his former rotation mate during the prime years of contention.

The Tigers helped Scherzer develop into the pitcher he is today. He was sent to the minors briefly in 2010 after allowing 27 earned runs in 18 innings across four stars. He’s basically been a star ever since. Scherzer won his first Cy Young award in Detroit and went to back-to-back All-Star games before hitting free agency in 2014.

But if anyone in the Tigers organization could have a re-do, they would put all the money they spent on Miguel Cabrera, Victor Martinez and others on hold to make sure they did whatever it took to keep Scherzer.

When he left Detroit, Scherzer was entering his age 30 season, which is typically close to a downward trend for any player — especially hard-throwing starting pitchers.

Well, Mad Max is an anomaly.

In the six seasons since (all with the Washington Nationals until a trade to the Los Angeles Dodgers at the 2021 deadline), Scherzer has made every single National League All-Star team and won two Cy Young awards.

In fact, he’s never finished outside the top five in Cy Young award voting since leaving Detroit, and he’s added three top-10 MVP finishes.

Scherzer owns an unfathomable 2.75 ERA, 2.87 FIP and 0.954 WHIP across 1,297.1 innings since the trade, with 1,699 strikeouts and only 288 walks. He led the Nationals to a World Series title in 2019 and has been excellent in the postseason.

Scherzer was a great pitcher for the Tigers. In the seven years since leaving, he’s probably been the best in the world.

JD Martinez

• When he left: July 2017
• How he left: Traded to Arizona Diamondbacks

There was something especially painful about the way Martinez’s tenure ended in Detroit. Maybe it’s because the Tigers picked him up, resurrected his career and turned him into the star before our very eyes.

Or maybe it’s because when they finally said goodbye, the Tigers got nothing — worse than nothing, actually — in return.

Houston released Martinez in June 2014 and the Tigers picked him up two days later. That season, he hit 23 home runs and 30 doubles while posting a .912 OPS (on base plus slugging percentage) in the heart of a lineup that included Cabrera, Victor Martinez, Ian Kinsler, Nick Castellanos and Torii Hunter.

It’s hard to imagine a greater underdog story. In four seasons with Detroit, J.D. Martinez hit 99 home runs, 111 doubles and batted exactly .300.

Then, the trade happened.

The market for Martinez was admittedly underwhelming because he’s a bad defender, but the players the Tigers got in return never made a positive impact in Detroit. Dawel Lugo was dumped after racking up negative 1.1 WAR across three seasons, and Sergio Alcantara was worth negative 0.3 WAR in 2020.

Translation: In exchange for one of the best Tigers hitters of this generation, Al Avila got a package that ultimately proved to be 1.4 wins worse than a replacement-level player.

Following the trade, Martinez was the best hitter in the league. He smashed 29 home runs in just 62 games with the Arizona Diamondbacks, carrying them to the postseason.

The following year, his first with the Boston Red Sox, Martinez hit a career-high 43 home runs, led the league with 130 RBI, finished fourth in MVP voting and won a World Series.

Eugenio Suarez

• When he left: December 2014
• How he left: Traded to Cincinnati Reds

This might sound secondary after talking about Verlander, Scherzer and Martinez, but believe me, Suarez was a terrible loss.

Anytime a team trades a slugger who goes on to flirt with a 50-homer season for a pitcher who pretty much everybody knew was bad, that’s painful.

I’m still not sure what Dave Dombrowski was thinking when he called up the Cincinnati Reds and asked for Alfredo Simon, who had one solid half-season as a starting pitcher only to watch it come crashing down after the All-Star break, as every underlying indicator suggested it would.

For more on how much I hated this trade, read this: “Think about just how disastrous the Eugenio Suarez trade was for the Detroit Tigers”

If you don’t remember, Suarez had emerged as an exciting prospect in the minors that season, hitting .288 with eight home runs and 18 doubles as a 22-year-old. He posted a .939 OPS in a short stint at Triple-A and became a 0.8 WAR player in a half-season with the Tigers.

After the trade — the Simon experiment went as expected (OK, I’ll stop for real this time) — Suarez grew into a prolific power hitter. He hit 81 home runs across three seasons from 2016-2018 before exploding with 49 bombs in 2019.

Guess who led the Tigers in home runs that season. Brandon Dixon. With 15.

Suarez has struggled with strikeouts the past few seasons, but that doesn’t change that the Tigers gave up on a 22-year-old who has gone on to hit 189 home runs with an .811 OPS for the Reds (so far).