Scott Harris and Jeff Greenberg did a lot of things in the run-up to Thursday’s trade deadline. None of those things looked like a major roster upgrade for a club that currently has a nine game lead in the AL Central and, along with the Blue Jays, the best record in the American League. All around them, similarly placed contenders acquired the top talent available on the trade market and improved their rosters, while the Detroit Tigers took on little more than salary dumps while trading a couple
of very minor prospects. Their only goal appeared to be papering over some holes in the bullpen and the rotation, and they did a credible job of that, but for everyone hoping they’d actually do something to put their roster over the top and keep pace with the other contenders, this week was a major disappointment.
The lack of a big trade wasn’t really a surprise, but that’s an issue when fans are finally back in force and heavily investing in the team as a portion of their entertainment budget. People are perfectly within their rights to feel like this front office doesn’t care about winning a title to the degree the fanbase does. Others are more willing to be patient and hope the front office’s belief in just staying competitive and hoping that the Tigers get hot in October is enough to win the organization’s first World Series title since 1984 sometime in the next half decade.
It may also be a issue to the players themselves, who may rightly feel that they’ve proven enough for the front office to boost the team with a really good player. It was at best a bare minimum effort to try and restore the roster to where it was a month or two ago, rather than a serious effort to actually upgrade it.
We can debate the quality of the five major league pitchers the Tigers acquired this week, but the fact they didn’t trade any of their top 15 prospects tells the tale. For my money the only notable prospect traded was 19-year-old switch-hitting catcher Enrique Jimenez. Josh Randall, the Tigers third rounder in 2024 out of the University of San Diego, has several solid offerings and generally throws strikes, but doesn’t really present the same upside as Jimenez at all. He was ranked in the teens in the system by MLB Pipeline, but no one else is that high on him right now. RJ Sales, who I’d argue has the better fastball of the two pitchers, is still a fringe prospect and not represented even at the back of most rankings of the farm system. The acquisition cost was very minimal, and so was the return in pitching talent.
Over the last two months, the Tigers have lost Jackson Jobe and Reese Olson, while Casey Mize has been banged up and struggling in the rotation after good work in April and May. Tommy Kahnle is just one of several relievers who have fallen apart over the past month as the bullpen’s season stats plummeted in July.
It’s debatable whether adding Chris Paddack and Charlie Morton to the rotation, and Kyle Finnegan and Rafael Montero to the bullpen, even gets the pitching staff to the level they were at earlier in the season when the Tigers were piling up wins in droves, let alone making them even better for a push in October. At best it was an efficient patch up job on the bullpen and should have that group in better shape than we’ve seen in recent weeks. The ability to move hard-throwing pitching prospect Troy Melton to the bullpen immediately does make a real impact on that group, but it also undercuts what is already a very shaky rotation beyond Tarik Skubal.
The Tigers did one thing that I expected to see more of in acquiring injured right-hander Paul Sewald from the Guardians for either cash considerations or a player to be named later. That was basically just the Guardians letting him go to save roughly two million in cash, and gave the Tigers an extra arm to stash away from their active roster until he hopefully is activated in mid-September. Sewald has been plagued by home runs this year especially, but he doesn’t walk many and he strikes a lot of guys out. Adding a reliever you can sort of keep in reserve without an active roster move is smart roster management this time of the year. Hopefully he can get right in time for the postseason.
There are certainly some extenuating circumstances involved in the lack of a major move. The trade market was complicated as usual and the hollowing out of a lot of the Tigers’ middle tier prospect depth this season due to injury left them in a less flexible position than they might have been. However, there were a lot of better relievers than Kyle Finnegan available, and other than the A‘s flame-throwing reliever Mason Miller for the Padres top prospect shortstop Leody de Vries, or Twins’ ace reliever Griffin Jax going to the Rays for a top 100 pitching prospect in Taj Bradley, none of them required a blue chip prospect.
Scott Harris is right when he’s discussed the balance between high commitment short term moves versus trying to be a consistent threat over a long period of time. The Tigers aren’t a high payroll team. They need to continue to develop their top talent to be a real force over the next decade and give themselves the best chance to win a World Series.
That doesn’t in any way preclude them from trading from the farm system. In fact, it’s probably mandatory if they’re ever going to win a title with this group. Sure, Kevin McGonigle and Max Clark are essentially untradeable, but the Tigers are already a 95 win team over their last 162 games with a relatively young core of players and the farm system is stacked. They have four more top 100 prospects beyond the two with top billing, and hitters like Hao-Yu Lee and Max Anderson who show up a tier or two lower. They also have some blocked former prospects who are still young enough to have some value like Keider Montero, Jace Jung, and Justyn-Henry Malloy.
The fact that the Tigers felt they couldn’t deal for a significant upgrade in a starting pitcher or a reliever is pretty stunning. It presents as a lack of confidence from the front office both in terms of their current evaluations, but also in their ability to keep restocking the farm system. It’s not as though they’re never going to find more top 100 prospects in the years ahead. In fact, acquiring and developing young talent is supposed to be the strength of this front office. Their early success in that regard is the thing Tigers fans have to bank on that Harris and Greenberg will be able to deliver a title during their tenure. No one expects Chris Ilitch and family to spend the way they did under his father.
Few really expected them to pony up prospects for Eugenio Suarez, but in the end the Mariners didn’t have to part with a top 100 prospect to get him. Top relief options David Bednar and Ryan Helsey didn’t cost an arm and a leg in prospects either. Generally I think the fanbase would have been pretty happy with one really good arm in any role, and some relief and rotation depth. That’s not asking the world of the Tigers’ front office in their current situation. Instead, they settled for the depth alone and once again put the burden on Chris Fetter and the coaching staff to produce a magic fix somehow.
Per Cody Stavenhagen of the Athletic Detroit’s reporting, one rival team described Harris as “difficult to work with.” That’s not the worst thing in the world for a guy running a team. It’s also not the first time we’ve heard criticism that Harris is unwilling to negotiate, naming his price and refusing to budge at all.
On the other hand, other front offices should also look to their own mistakes.
Jeff Passan reported today that the Pirates were holding out for catching prospect Josue Briceño in exchange for closer David Bednar. If true, that’s just a ridiculous ask from the Pirates, and they ultimately settled for a catching prospect in the Yankees’ Rafael Flores who is tiers lower than Briceño in the eyes of most prospect evaluators.
Another classic example is the Dodgers and Yankees failure to deal for Justin Verlander at the 2017 trade deadline. In both cases they characterized the Tigers as asking an unreasonable amount in prospect return, and passed on a deal. Then they watched the Houston Astros swoop in with a solid package of prospects at the last moment. In October, Verlander was a big difference maker for a club that went on to bounce the Yankees and Dodgers en route to a World Series title.
Harris and Greenberg aren’t the only ones who can be too stubborn.
However, there was one Harris comment after the deadline ended that just came off as divorced with reality. A question about Tarik Skubal’s season and a half remaining until free agency was asked, and Harris referred to the idea of a Tarik Skubal “window” of opportunity as an illusion.
Last time we checked, Tarik Skubal exists in the real world as the best pitcher in baseball. Last we heard, talks about an extension came early last offseason, when sources told the Freep’s Evan Petzold that the Tigers initial offer was “non-competitive.”
Unless Harris is just quibbling words and metaphors, and doesn’t like the term “window,” he’s not making any sense. There is quite clearly a distinct opportunity to win a World Series this year and next, specifically because the Tigers have the best pitcher in baseball for a little while longer. Having Tarik Skubal available to pitch a quarter of your innings in a postseason series is a competitive edge that makes them a credible threat in October in 2025 and 2026, should they get there. Without him, the Tigers are just a good but not great roster of positional talent without a single elite arm to lean on. If Harris thinks having Skubal is an inconsequential factor in the postseason and that it’s all just luck at that point, I don’t know what we’re doing here.
Again this just sounds like Harris dismissing any desire for a little aggression as some kind of all-in decimation of the farm system, and it’s a complete red herring. Quite literally no one is asking him to deal even more than one of his top six prospects for MLB talent right now. The hope was just that the Tigers roster would emerge from the deadline looking improved over the first half model. That did not happen.
It almost feels as though the front office applies the exact same valuation to players in the regular season as they do in the postseason, and it just doesn’t work like that. The impact of a top reliever versus that of a solid but unspectacular reliever like Kyle Finnegan over the course of a season is not nearly as great as the cost difference between them. That changes under the more intense conditions of the postseason when teams can bring their best arms to bear in a higher percentage of innings that they would during the regular season. The team with the top couple of arms usually wins in the end. Finding those last pieces to put you over the top is quite often the difference.
The counter argument is that every year there are tons of deals made, and by and large they don’t lead to a World Series title. You can ask the Padres about this. Teams pony up big time prospects most years, and usually it doesn’t put them over the top. However, for teams that draft and develop well, theoretically a group that includes the Tigers, it also doesn’t destroy them to give up a top 100 prospect now and again either. You have to keep developing young talent either way.
Coloring all of this is the recent history of the game. There just isn’t an example of a lower payroll, homegrown roster winning a World Series in the last decade. Even the Royals 2015 title was largely powered by a couple of big trades, even if they didn’t necessarily come at the deadline that year. They’d already made big moves to acquire ace relievers Greg Holland and Wade Davis before they got to that point. Particularly for a smaller market team that refuses to compete with the big spenders around the league, there’s just minimal precedent for winning a World Series while hoarding all your prospect capital. And yet Harris appears to be waiting for his own prospects to reach the major leagues and carry them the rest of the way despite the fact that Skubal is bound to leave for free agency after the 2026 season.
All the fanbase was asking for was something in the middle ground between hoarding every prospect and going full Dave Dombrowski and trading for a pair of star talents to put the Tigers over the top.
Even by Harris’ own focus on efficiency, holding onto all your prospects isn’t a good idea. If you choose not to trade them, you still have made a choice to value them more highly than the players you could have acquired with them in trade. Knowing when to convert future value to present value is another skill in a top executive’s arsenal, and so far Harris has fumbled some value from young talent in his short time in Detroit.
One of his first moves was to cut Willi Castro, who went on to several very good seasons in Minnesota. He turned reliever Joe Jimenez into hitting prospect Justyn-Henry Malloy. At any point last season Malloy and fellow prospect Jace Jung, who Harris inherited as a fringe top 100 prospect in the game, had significantly more trade value than they do now. That real value lost through Harris’ evaluation that the two of them would develop into real contributors. Maybe there’s a chance they rebound, but it’s unlikely they’re ever as valuable as they were when the front office decided not to convert them into MLB level talent last year.
My point is just that by limiting themselves to building from within, with small free agent acquisitions and very minor trades to fill in the cracks, the Tigers are taking an extremely difficult path to trying to win a World Series. To pull off a title that way on a team with only a modest payroll, you can’t really make any mistakes in evaluating your own talent or in free agency. Failed acquisitions like Kenta Maeda or Alex Cobb are easily shrugged off by most teams. That’s more difficult when you’re banking on getting every last bit of value out of your payroll and farm system. That doesn’t happen by just holding on to everyone and hoping they all work out. Even the majority of top 100 prospects never really turn into consistent above average regulars who would be sorely missed in the years ahead.
All front offices will make some mistakes, of course. We’re generally supporters of Harris and certainly view him as a significant upgrade over the Avila regime. His front office has done brilliantly in the draft and in trading talent for prospects, and well as showing good development chops that have contributed to ongoing rise of the player development system spearheaded by Ryan Garko since 2022. There is a lot that they do well, so no I’m not calling for their firing or losing my mind here a day after the deadline moves. It’s just baffling to see the same group that can do those things well suddenly become so timid in their current situation.
I’m just unable to shake the feeling that Harris and Greenberg don’t have as much confidence in their roster as you’d expect, nor in their ability to sustain this success without hoarding every legitimate prospect they have. A lack of aggression and their fear of making a mistake may well prove to be the big mistake. There is risk in complacency as well. This trade deadline may haunt this front office for years to come if the Tigers stumble down the stretch or are unceremoniously bounced out of the postseason early on.
In the end, the Tigers are at least a pretty good team if not the dominant force they looked like until late June. They still have Skubal and they still have a shot at a title this year. But their minor moves at the trade deadline left many around the game outside of the Tigers’ sphere scratching their heads as much as the fanbase.
More from blessyouboys.com:
- BYB 2021 Detroit Tigers prospects #15: IF Colt Keith
- Tigers vs. Pirates Preview: Tigers head home to take on star-less swashbucklers
- Behind Enemy Lines: A pre-series chat with Jeremy Brener of Bucs Dugout
- Tigers 2, Athletics 3: Ninth inning miscues lead to walk-off sweep in Oakland
- Royals 3, Tigers 1: Tigers threaten but do not win
- Ian Kinsler trade rumors: Brewers ‘digging in’
- Detroit Tigers News: Justin Verlander might actually be traded this week
