While trade talks swirled for several weeks around Tarik Skubal, the Tigers never seriously considered moving him.
"There were a lot of rumors that floated out there, a lot of unconfirmed reports that are just totally inaccurate," Tigers president of baseball ops Scott Harris said after Tuesday's 6 p.m. trade deadline. "We never came close to trading Skubal."
Asked if they were tempted to trade him given what they might have received in return, Harris declined comment. Amid Skubal's Cy Young-caliber season, there was speculation that the Tigers could cash him in for a haul of young position players. Both the Orioles and Dodgers were said to be interested in making legitimate offers.
It doesn't sound like talks got very far. The Tigers will keep Skubal at the top of their rotation and try to build a better team around him moving forward. The 27-year-old lefty is under team control through 2026.
Detroit did trade Jack Flaherty minutes before the deadline, sending him to the Dodgers for a pair of prospects. It's the second year in a row the Tigers have rebuilt a free agent starting pitcher into a valuable big-league commodity and flipped him as a rental.
The plan moving forward, said Harris, is to retain such players and add talent at this juncture of the season.
"We need to use that ability to find those same pitchers like Jack, help them develop and then keep them in this organization to help us continue to win throughout the season and moving forward. Eventually, we’re going to get to a place where I’m sitting in front of this microphone and we’re acquiring players for a pennant race," he said.
Asked if he can define 'eventually,' Harris said, "No, it’s July of 2024."
"We are working as hard we can to make that happen as fast as we can," he said. "However, we can’t go chasing shortcuts to try to make sure that we are buying a year from now. Because sometimes when you do that, you end up being like a comet of an organization. In a flash, maybe we can achieve that by July of next year, but at what cost? Does that mean another 10-year run of selling at the deadline?
"We’re trying to build this the right way, I think we’re off to an excellent start. We want an extended window of time where we’re buying at the deadline."