{"id":392414,"date":"2026-01-07T04:41:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T04:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/392414\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T04:41:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T04:41:07","slug":"tigers-dugan-darnell-agree-to-minor-league-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/392414\/","title":{"rendered":"Tigers, Dugan Darnell Agree To Minor League Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Tigers agreed to a minor league contract with reliever Dugan Darnell<\/a>, as first reflected on the MLB.com transaction tracker<\/a>. Evan Petzold of The Detroit Free-Press<\/a> reports that Darnell will receive a non-roster invite to MLB camp. He\u2019d make a little more than the $780K league minimum if he cracks the big league roster.<\/p>\n

Although Darnell will be with the club in camp, he\u2019s not going to see any game action. The 28-year-old underwent surgery to repair a labrum tear in his left hip at the end of September. That came with an eight-month recovery timetable that\u2019ll sideline him into May. He\u2019ll presumably head to Triple-A Toledo at that point and look to pitch his way onto the MLB roster.<\/p>\n

Darnell is a native of Northville, Michigan, who played collegiately in the state at Division III Adrian College. He went undrafted and pitched in the independent ranks before getting a professional look with the Rockies. Darnell pitched to a 3.74 earned run average across 200 minor league appearances in the Colorado organization. That included 53 2\/3 frames of 3.19 ERA ball in a very difficult environment at Triple-A Albuquerque last season. Darnell earned his first MLB call as a result, allowing five runs over 11 2\/3 innings until suffering the injury.<\/p>\n

The righty has a three-pitch mix led by a 93-94 MPH fastball. He uses a splitter as his top secondary offering against left-handed hitters while relying more evenly on the split and a slider against righties. Darnell didn\u2019t show enough in his limited MLB look to hold an offseason 40-man spot with Colorado. He bounced to Pittsburgh and Detroit on waiver claims. The Tigers non-tendered him shortly after but succeeded in bringing him back in a non-roster capacity. They did the same with non-tendered receivers Jack Little<\/a>,\u00a0Tyler Mattison<\/a>,\u00a0Tanner Rainey<\/a> and Sean Guenther<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Petzold reported<\/a> yesterday that Detroit reached minor league deals with each of\u00a0Dylan File<\/a>,\u00a0Woo-suk Go<\/a> and\u00a0Wandisson Charles<\/a>. None of that trio received an invite to Spring Training, however. That indicates they\u2019re viewed purely as organizational depth arms. All three of those pitchers have had stints on a team\u2019s 40-man roster in the past, but none has gotten to the MLB level.<\/p>\n

File is coming off a 4.70 ERA between the top two minor league levels in the Seattle farm system. He\u2019s a starter who owns a 4.33 ERA over seven seasons in the minors. Go was a closer in his native South Korea. He signed a two-year, $4.5MM contract with the Padres over the 2023-24 offseason. Go failed to break camp and was quickly traded to the Marlins as a salary offset in the\u00a0Luis Arraez<\/a> deal. He has kicked around the upper minors over the past two years, including 20 appearances in the Detroit system a year ago. Charles is a 29-year-old reliever with a 98 MPH fastball who has never been able to find the strike zone. He has pitched in the A\u2019s and Baltimore systems and spent the 2025 campaign in Mexico.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Tigers agreed to a minor league contract with reliever Dugan Darnell, as first reflected on the MLB.com…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392415,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[190302,190303,363,99,190304,190305],"class_list":{"0":"post-392414","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-dugan-darnell","9":"tag-dylan-file","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-wandisson-charles","13":"tag-woo-suk-go"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}