Scott Harris rejects idea that Tigers jumped gun on Skubal trade: "That's garbage"

Scott Harris heard the critics. He took the chance to respond to them about an hour after the trade deadline passed on Monday.

Asked about the market for Tarik Skubal, Harris said, "I saw some stuff out there, like this notion that had we waited until the deadline day the return would be different. I can just address that directly."

Harris said the Tigers entered the Skubal trade talks "with a firm idea of the type of deal that we wanted to ultimately land, and a deep understanding of what every organization had to offer." Given that, "I'm very confident that we maximized the market and that the overall health and outlook of this organization is better for how we handled the deal and when we pulled the trigger on it."

By the measure of top 100 prospects, per MLB Pipeline, the Tigers got the best return of any single trade by a seller. In Harris' view, "there is a unique dynamic with a player like Tarik Skubal. Markets at the deadline for the top players are just different than the rest of the market."

"I understand the sort of intuition that you're supposed to wait until the very last second on a deal and then pull a trigger to maximize the return. That's not how markets for the top players work," Harris said. "There was no team that was pursuing Tarik Skubal that was waiting to see if they could get someone else and then pivoting to Tarik if they didn't get him. There weren't these market forces that were affecting what each team's appetite was for a package to land Skubal. That was very clear in all of my conversations with the teams that we talked to."

When a player of Skubal's stature becomes available, said Harris, he immediately becomes everyone's priority. Teams are quick to act to avoid being left out. Harris confirmed there "was a bidding war" for Skubal, and said "the organizations that were involved were extremely aggressive."

"They put in what I believed to be their max offers, and then they added to those offers," he said. "It got to a point of almost audible pain when they actually produced their best bold offers."

That happened Saturday night.

"With a player that is truly at the top of the market, that is truly one of one, we had the steering wheel and we could steer it as fast or as slow as we wanted to," Harris said. "We felt like we put ourselves in a position Saturday night where it was abundantly clear what every organization was going to be able to do. We laid down all the offers in front of us, and we chose one."

The one they chose featured outfielder Zyhir Hope and pitcher River Ryan from the Dodgers, marking the first time ever that a rental has been traded on his own at the deadline for two top-100 prospects.

"So, respectfully, the notion that we should have waited 24 or 48 hours later and extracted more value, that's garbage," Harris said. "That's not how these negotiations work."

Harris added that the Tigers had to make a "really tough" call between competitive offers, "and it wasn't unanimous."

"It wasn't like, 'hey, there's this one deal, the Dodgers will do this.’ There were multiple deals here, and it was a really tough decision. It's a credit to Tarik. That's how good he is. He is a really special player. Everybody knows that and many organizations saw that and really tried to add him to their team. The Dodgers ultimately had the best deal and the one that fit us best, and we were excited to pull the trigger."