Detroit Tigers Trade Rumors: J.D. Martinez to the San Francisco Giants?

The latest Detroit Tigers trade rumor has the club discussing a potential J.D. Martinez trade with the San Francisco Giants.

The Detroit Tigers have made it clear that they’re open to considering all trade offers. The clubs stated approach to the offseason is to run leaner payrolls while getting younger for the future. We’ve already seen trade rumors involving Justin Verlander and Ian Kinsler and even some brief chatter surrounding Miguel Cabrera.

The latest rumor comes from Jon Morosi and involves the Tigers discussing J.D. Martinez with the San Francisco Giants.

The Giants don’t have a particularly deep farm system so it might be difficult for the two sides to strike an acceptable deal. Minor League Ball ranked the Giants as having the 20th best farm system in baseball back in April (the Tigers were 26th).

Still, the Giants do have prospect names that would be interesting to the Tigers. Principally, shortstop Christian Arroyo and starting pitcher Tyler Beede. It’s not clear that they would like to part with either of their top prospects for one year of Martinez, but with a salary a tick below $12 million and a possible WAR projection around 3.0, he (i.e. Martinez) could provide a surplus value of roughly $13 million.

As with all of these rumors, it’s not clear how serious the discussions have been. One thing we do know, however: this is shaping up to be an incredibly interesting offseason for the Tigers.

UPDATE: Morosi has received additional context on the trade talks. Apparently the discussions between the Tigers and Giants took place at last week’s general manager’s meetings but they have not since resumed.

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On one hand, if the Tigers are going to sell even one or two of these big-name pieces it makes sense for them to dismantle the entire thing. On the other hand, that would surely lead to a 100-loss season which would be difficult for fans to swallow.