Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris pushed back on the notion that the organization should have held off on dealing Tarik Skubal to the Dodgers.
Skubal, who has won back-to-back Cy Young Awards, was traded to the Dodgers over the weekend ahead of Monday’s trade deadline.
The Tigers received outfield prospect Zyhir Hope and right-handed pitching prospects River Ryan and Brady Smith, but there had been some thought over whether Harris should have waited to trade the talented starting pitcher to try and maximize the offers he would have gotten.
“We came into this with a firm idea of the type of deal that we wanted to ultimately land. And we had a deep understanding of what every organization had to offer,” Harris told reporters. “I think 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. So I understand the intuition that, ‘Hey you’re supposed to wait until the very last second on a deal and then pull a trigger at the very last second to maximize a return.’ That’s not how markets for the top players work.
“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 ultimately affecting what each team’s appetite was for a package to land Skubal.”
Harris also said that it became clear through conversations with other organizations that the market was set for someone like Skubal and that the Tigers “could steer it as fast or as slow as we wanted to” when it came to finding the right move for the organization.
“We felt like we put ourselves in a position on Saturday night where it was abundantly clear what every organization was going to be able to do, and we laid down all the offers in front of us and we chose one. I’m very confident that we absolutely maximized the return we could get for Tarik Skubal,” Harris said.
The Tigers executive also said that several teams pursued Skubal aggressively before Detroit’s front office decided that the Dodgers’ offer was the best deal, describing the interest in the star pitcher as a “bidding war.”
Even with Skubal on to a new club, Harris explained that they did believe a playoff run still could be in the cards for the Tigers, who also dealt starter Casey Mize to the Padres.
The ballclub is 2 ½ games back of a wild-card spot in the American League.
