Detroit Tigers: Trades Could Come Quickly if Team Decides to Sell
By Matt Snyder
With the loss last night in Boston, the Detroit Tigers have fallen back to two games below the .500 mark and sit four games out of a Wild Card spot. Four games isn’t an impossible margin to make up with still more than two months to play, but the reality of the situation is the that the Tigers are just 33-42 since the end of April.
The Tigers actually had an opportunity to take command of a Wild Card position heading into the All-Star break — they would have needed to sweep the Minnesota Twins — but, after taking the first game, they lost the final three games of a series in Minnesota.
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Things haven’t been different on this side of the All-Star break either. The Tigers have won just four games out of the ten they’ve played and now appear to be on the cusp of punting on the rest of the 2015 season in order to better position themselves for 2016 and beyond.
Members of the Detroit Tigers organization are reportedly set to meet on Monday when the team gets to Tampa. We obviously don’t haven’t seen an agenda for the meeting, but the thinking is that the front office will begin making decisions on how the team should act at the trade deadline.
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We don’t know if the Tigers will ultimately decide to sell or not — there’s been a (somewhat dubious) report that they’ll actually buy — and if they do sell we don’t know if the dominoes will start falling on Monday or if they’ll wait all the way up to Friday’s 4:00 p.m. trade deadline. But if they do start trading away players, expect several moves to come in quick succession.
We’ve been inundated over the last several days with reports of teams’ interest in Tigers assets. David Price and Yoenis Cespedes are the big names, but Rajai Davis has attracted a team or two, and there’s been some loose association of Alex Avila and the Seattle Mariners. The Tigers would also likely try to find a taker for closer Joakim Soria.
If the Tigers lose again on Monday — and fall three games below the .500 mark — they would be in a position of needing to win all of their remaining games just to climb back to .500 before the trade deadline. Winning three games in-a-row certainly isn’t impossible in the game of baseball, but it’s a feat the Tigers haven’t accomplished in over a month.
If the Tigers lose on Monday, they’re almost certainly sellers.
If that ends up being the case, the Tigers would probably rather trade David Price ahead of his scheduled Tuesday start instead of allowing him to start and risk an injury.
And once Price is gone there’s almost no reason to hang on to any of the other impending free agents (Cespedes, Davis, Avila, and Soria), so the Tigers would look to move quickly on deals for those players as well.
The Tigers front office is trying their best to hold up the trade dam, but once it bursts it could be a flood.
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