Seattle (CNN) — Scott Harris, the president of baseball operations for the Detroit Tigers, has at least one thing in common with Riley Greene, the team’s 25-year-old former first round draft pick and three-time All-Star outfielder.
“I hate selling with every fiber of my body,” Harris told reporters a little more than an hour after the trade deadline on Monday night. “I absolutely hate it. I don’t want to be in a position where we’re selling in July.”
And yet, the Tigers sold in July, dealing their best two starters, including Tarik Skubal – two-time reigning Cy Young Award winner and the best pitcher in the American League dating back to the beginning of 2024 by any number of metrics (ERA, FIP, fWAR). Skubal was the prize of the deadline, a top-of-the-rotation talent deemed a difference maker by none other than the behemoth Los Angeles Dodgers.
This was very likely always going to be his last season in Detroit. In 2024 and 2025, Skubal had led the club to its first two postseason berths in nearly a decade. The hope was to get one more go at it before he departed in free agency.
“We didn’t go into this season intending to trade Tarik Skubal,” Harris said. “If anything, it was the opposite. We had opportunities to trade him this winter, and we chose not to because we’re trying to win the World Series here.”
Now, they’ll never know what could have been. Even though Harris hated it, he traded Skubal and Casey Mize, the former first overall draft pick.
“I mean, I wish we didn’t trade anyone,” Greene said before an 8-0 win over the Seattle Mariners on Tuesday.
Although that is where their similarities on this issue end.
“But I’m here to play baseball,” Greene continued, “and that’s not my decision.”
The Tigers were favorites to win the American League Central at the outset of the season. The AL is, broadly speaking, weaker than expected. Most teams are mediocre.
The problem is, the Tigers are one of those teams. When the clock struck 6 p.m. ET on August 3 – the deadline for deals – their record sat at a disappointing 54-58. Four games below .500, fourth in the division.
What went wrong matters. The organization will need to take an autopsy of the early part of the year, especially a 6-22 May, if it hasn’t already.
“I can look back, and I will look back, a lot into how we got to this point,” manager AJ Hinch said on Tuesday before their first post-deadline game. First, though, he had to look forward at the game in front of him, a game they might as well try to win.
With 50 games to go after the deadline, the Tigers insist that trading one of the best pitchers on the planet plus another key part of their top-notch rotation does not constitute waving the white flag.
“Firm no,” Harris said. “The season is not over.”
“I see what we have in front of us – five-and-a-half [games] back in the AL Central and two-and-a-half [games] back in the wild card,” said closer Kenley Jansen, who was expected to be dealt as well if the team went into full teardown mode. “Just make a push. Why not? It’s not over ‘til it’s over.”
“They were the reason why our clubhouse was our clubhouse, and our team chemistry was our team chemistry,” Greene said of the departed players. “So yeah, it’s going to be a little different, but we still have a job to take care of. We’re two games out of the playoffs. We’re right in this thing.”
“We obviously know that the personnel changes,” Hinch said. “But the objective doesn’t change, the goal doesn’t change, the standards and expectations don’t change.”
Recent history has provided them with a useful example (or is it an excuse?) for hanging their hopes on. Two years ago, Detroit dealt starting pitcher Jack Flaherty at the deadline amid a spiral that saw them bottom out at 10 games back of a playoff spot with 0.2% odds of making the postseason, according to FanGraphs in mid-August. Then, they surged to a 31-13 run down the stretch to sneak in the postseason. That was the first of Skubal’s Cy Young seasons.
“This team is talented enough to flip the script just like the 2024 team did,” Harris said.
On Friday, before they traded Skubal, the Tigers’ playoff odds were 26.6%. By Monday’s deadline, they were down to 18.3%.
That left Harris with a tough truth to swallow: “Did I make it a little bit harder this week? Yeah, I did.”
They cite injury returns and internal options as exciting reinforcements. One of the prospect pitchers netted in the return, River Ryan, might make it to the big leagues down the stretch. They boast the probable AL Rookie of the Year in Kevin McGonigle as part of a lineup that has gotten red hot recently. And, as Jansen put it, “At the end of the day, let’s think about it, who plays every day? It’s the position players and the bullpen who is pitching every day.”
None of that, though, is as compelling a reason for competitive verve and undaunted confidence as the explanation that it simply beats the alternative.
“There’s no other way to approach the game than with optimism that our best baseball is good enough,” Hinch said.
Maybe the Tigers will play like they have something to prove down the stretch. Maybe they’ll play with a chip on their shoulder. Or maybe they were always better than their first-half record and now they’re not as good as they were with Skubal and Mize but better than they looked at their worst. Maybe that’s good enough to get in – although, if they do, they might miss their ace even more come October.
“It’s hard,” Hinch said unequivocally of the personal toll of a job where you can coach someone for six seasons – mentor them but also rely on them, celebrate as a team but also take pride in their individual successes – only to wake up one day in the middle of the gauntlet grind of the MLB season to find they’re no longer next to you and, when you do cross paths again, it will be as adversaries.
But then he said the part that supersedes all of that. The most honest assessment of a situation that lends itself to unintentional ambivalence and useful platitudes: “We’re conditioned to deal with it.”
On Tuesday, Skubal made his first start for the Dodgers. He pitched pretty well – six innings of two-run ball with six strikeouts – but LA lost anyway. His old Tigers team, facing a Mariners club that they’ll need to leapfrog in the standings to snag a wild card berth, enjoyed an emphatic victory. Despite selling, they’re now just one-and-a-half games back in the wild card race.
One win down, 49 games to go.
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