The Tigers were active at the trade deadline, but not all that aggressive. They made a handful of additions to their pitching staff, Kyle Finnegan the most notable among them. They protected their top prospects and what they believe is an exceedingly bright future by taking low-risk swings on veterans like Charlie Morton and Paul Sewald, otherwise banking on continued growth within.
While several high-end relievers who would have helped Detroit's struggling bullpen were moved, Scott Harris said the asks for those arms was prohibitive to the Tigers' aim of building a sustained winner, which they've already begun to do. They lead the AL Central by nine games, and tout the best record in the American League since last year's All-Star break.
"Some of the prices around the game were really high for short-term rental relievers. It’s a really valuable position and clearly the game values that," Harris said. "As we started to navigate the market and hear the asking prices for some of these guys, we felt like it was a better approach for us to attack it in volume."
Finnegan, an All-Star last year, is the best pitcher the Tigers acquired. It cost them two mid-tier pitching prospects. In addition to Sewald, who's on the IL with a shoulder strain and won't be back until September, they also added Rafael Montero to their bullpen. They added Chris Paddack along with Morton to their rotation. All of them have mediocre numbers this year. The upshot to the Morton move is that the Tigers bumped Troy Melton into a relief role, giving them another swing-and-miss arm where they need it.
By contrast, the Yankees, who are 3.5 games behind the Tigers and Blue Jays for the top spot in the American League, added three of the best relievers on the market in David Bednar from the Pirates, Camilo Doval from the Giants and Jake Bird from the Rockies without surrendering a single top-100 prospect, per MLB Pipeline.
The Mariners, who swept the Tigers last month and currently occupy a wild card spot, made two major moves for middle-of-the-order bats in Eugenio Suarez and Josh Naylor from the Diamondbacks, also without surrendering a top-100 prospect.
Harris says the flashiest moves don't always win, and have the potential to backfire.
"The flashiest moves generate the headlines. It’s what people are talking about this time of year. They’re not aways the most effective moves," he said. "If you study every deadline over the last 10 years, I think one thing you’ll find is that oftentimes the flashiest move generates a lot of excitement at the time and fails to impact the team as much as you would have hoped or liked. I’m not saying that’s all the time. There are anecdotes of certain moves changing the trajectory of an organization. I’m just arguing that that’s the exception not the rule.
"There will be times in my tenure where we do chase the flashiest name and we go land the flashiest name and it does really help us, but only if it fits what we think we need to address in the second half leading into October. I think the evidence doesn’t necessarily match the perception in terms of the most talked-about name being the actual best player for the stretch run and deep into October. That was one thing that was top of mind for us."
And given the prices in this particular market, said Harris, "a lot of the moves we passed on felt like moves that were going to haunt us for many years to come." The Phillies, for example, surrendered two top-100 prospects, per MLB Pipeline, for Twins closer Jhoan Duran, while the Padres surrendered one of the top overall prospects in baseball, shortstop Leo De Vries -- the equivalent of Kevin McGonigle or Max Clark for the Tigers -- as part of their package for A's closer Mason Miller. But neither Duran nor Miller are rentals.
Harris and the Tigers were not willing to part with their own top prospects at the risk of damaging what could be a contending team for several years to come.
"We have what we think is one of the best if not the best farm system in all of baseball, and that means we got really good players coming. We got really good players that are going to be fan favorites playing at Comerica Park for many years and helping us win a lot of games and some of those guys are going to get here this year," he said. "We felt like at this moment in time, in this organization, giving up on young players to chase short-term fixes is not in the best interests of the Tigers, both in the short and long term, so we tried to attack it creatively."
When it came to "the bigger names that we were interested in," Harris said, "the asks thoroughly convinced us that these would be trades that we would regret for many years, that they would be trades that would haunt us, that we would be trading players that have a chance to be really productive Tigers for many years, both as soon as the second half of this year and in future years."
Harris also noted that some of the biggest names on the market this year were once "thrown into trades" as prospects "and then came back to burn those organizations." That Tigers know this all too well with Suarez, who they traded 11 years ago in a deal for veteran pitcher Alfredo Simon only to watch him become one of the top power hitters in the game.
"This comes with a real cost that is sometimes invisible at the deadline to casual observers," Harris said. "If you move some players that you really believe in, sometimes it makes you worse. Sometimes if you go grab the flashiest player, you have to trade away a better player to get that player. We were hyper-conscious of that. We’re not averse to doing those deals, but I think specifically when we lined up deals with other teams, the asks were some players that we think might actually be better than the players we would be acquiring. They’re obviously on different timelines, but it’s really important that we continue to build through development and through the growth that we can access from within. It’s one of the reasons why we’re here right now and why this organization is still healthy and why we have a nine-game lead in the division and a farm system that’s winning a ton.
"I gotta balance that, that’s the job. And if that subjects me to criticism, I totally understand it. I’m just never going to make moves to avoid criticism if they’re not in the best interest of the organization. And I think in my tenure here, I’ve made some really unpopular moves in the draft, in free agency, via trade, and I think one of the reasons why we’re here is that a lot of those non-moves, a lot of those non-decisions actually set us up better for the future than they would have in the press release that comes right after those deadlines. I was hyper-conscious of that.
"We’ll see if I got it right, but that’s what I was thinking about when we got deep into talks with some of those bigger names."