Let’s get this out of the way because it needs to be said as plainly and directly as possible.
Detroit Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris has no choice but to trade ace Tarik Skubal. I can offer a litany of reasons – and I will shortly – but above all else, there’s one main reason Harris has to deal Skubal for whatever value he can get.
That reason is this: The Tigers are not going to win the World Series.
After that, everything else is noise and doesn’t matter. Because what would be the point of getting absolutely nothing for Skubal at the Aug. 3 MLB trade deadline just for the remote possibility of keeping him around to help the Tigers try to squeak into the playoffs so that they can lose in Game 5 of the division series for a third straight year?
And suggesting the Tigers would even get that far is more than generous. Honestly, have you looked at the baseball standings this year? Like, at all?
If you’ve been brave enough to steal an occasional glance and still have even a sliver of playoff hope for this team, your view of the standings is either obscured by too many Skubal bobbleheads on our desk or you spent so much time in the Tigers clubhouse during those postseason beer showers that you’re still a little tipsy.
In the sobering light of today’s standings at the All-Star break, the reality is much different. The Tigers are a whopping 44-52. That’s the fourth-worst record in the American League.
“Oh, but they’re just 3½ games out of the wild card!” someone, who probably has a life-size wall decal of Justin Verlander in their room, might say.
Yes, they are. But there are still six teams ahead of them for the final wild-card spot. And that’s after the Tigers went 15-11 in June and entered the All-Star break on a 9-3 tear.
And if I hear one more person bring up the Tigers’ magical run at the end of the 2024 season, I swear …
“I think we’re a really good team, and there’s so many guys in this room that have proven that we can go on a run like we did in ’24,” Skubal recently told WXYT-FM.
As I was saying, I swear I can tell you that person is on the Tigers’ payroll.
The truth is nothing the Tigers are going to do in their next 17 games before the trade deadline (with several games coming against awful teams in the Angels, Athletics and Royals) is going to tell Harris or anyone else anything they don’t already know about this team. Namely, that the Tigers can’t hit, their bullpen is awful, their starting pitchers have underwhelmed and they’ve had too many injuries.
So go ahead and apply all the pretzel logic you want in order to contort the Tigers’ predicament into its most favorable form, but you know in your heart this is not a great or even a very good team. You also know in your heart that if you dared tell any baseball fan outside of Detroit that the Tigers are a legitimate playoff team, you would be rightly ridiculed.
But there’s another reason Harris should, and probably will, trade Skubal: He loves value. That’s why he signed Colt Keith and Kevin McGonigle to long-term, team-friendly contracts.
There’s also value in hope for the future. Keeping Skubal for the pipe dream of making the playoffs guarantees nothing. But trading him for a starting player and some high-level prospects turns the conversation from a pipe dream to the MLB pipeline.
Of course, aggressively hunting for value like a crazed Black Friday shopper hasn’t always worked out for Harris. He took a resounding beating at the arbitration table against Skubal when the Tigers offered an almost laughably low $19 million and the panel went with Skubal’s $32 million proposal.
But maybe that wasn’t such a bad loss after all for Harris. If everything had worked out this season the way the Tigers had hoped, and they found a way to take one more step and reach the ALCS with Skubal leading the way (presumably with some deadline additions), then that $32 million would have been considered a costly but worthwhile expenditure.
Now that it looks like Harris will need to unload Skubal, the Tigers won’t be on the hook for his entire salary. Instead, by dealing Skubal, Harris would get to save some money, acquire more young talent and continue to look to the future.
In my book, that’s a pretty good trade.
Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com and follow him on X @cmonarrez.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: The 1 big reason Tigers should trade ace Tarik Skubal at MLB deadline
Reporting by Carlos Monarrez, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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By Carlos Monarrez, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
