Detroit Tigers: Trade deadline selloff appears inevitable
By Matt Snyder
The Detroit Tigers appear to be headed for a July filled with trade rumors and an eventual deadline selloff as the losses continue to pile.
The Detroit Tigers lost again on Wednesday night — their fifth loss in a row — to fall to 32-39 on the season. They’re in fourth place in the American League Central, a half game off the bottom of the division, and 6.5 games behind the first place Twins.
The American League is a jumbled mess in the middle and the Tigers are ‘only’ five games out of Wild Card position but they’d have to jump seven teams to claim a spot. They’re certainly not out of the race, strange things happen all the time, but the front office is going to need to make a decision to shift to sell mode, and that decision could come soon.
Jon Morosi reported at the end of May that the Tigers were planning to make their veterans available in trades if they finished the month of June with a record below the .500 mark. They haven’t clinched that mark yet, but their backs are firmly against the wall. The Tigers stand seven games below .500 with eight games to play so a single loss will put them over the edge.
But the decision to sell assets and build for the future shouldn’t be about arbitrary lines demarcation. The Tigers have not shown themselves to be capable of making a sustained run of success this season. They’re a team full of holes with an aging veteran core and few minor league assets.
There are two ways forward at this point:
- Spend more money
- Build for the future
The Tigers have already been running with opening day payrolls of nearly $200 million in each of the last two seasons. The organization appeared willing to sustain that burden as Mike Ilitch chased his dream of a winning a World Series title, but they can’t sustain that level of spending in the long term. Spending their way to the next wave of success is out of the question.
That leaves us with building for the future. This will mean a number of lean years as the franchise trims a number of highly-priced veterans from their books, but the process needs to be an active one.
The Tigers tried a mini reboot two years ago when they dealt David Price and Yoenis Cespedes in deadline deals that netted them Michael Fulmer and Daniel Norris (among others). They need to do that same sort of thing again, but on a larger scale.
The next division winning team is at least three years away. Any player whose contract is up before 2020 — or any player whose contract cost is expected to exceed his on-field value by 2020 — should be made available for trade with extreme focus on players who will hit free agency this year.
That, of course, means J.D. Martinez is the prime candidate to be traded ahead of the July 31 trade deadline, but trades of Alex Avila and even Francisco Rodriguez should be explored as well. The Tigers should be willing to eat any and all remaining dollars in order to get better prospect packages in return. They need to build by adding assets, not simply stripping away liabilities.
The next priority group would be players who are a year out from free agency. Notable players in this group are Ian Kinsler and Justin Wilson. Kinsler isn’t having the tremendous season at the plate he had last year, but he’s still a tremendously valuable player who could still end up being worth 4+ WAR.
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A difficult decision would be whether or not to explore trading face-of-the-franchise type players like Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander. If they’re truly hitting the reset button, shaving (some) of their high-priced dollars off the books while bringing some top talent into the farm system would be a difficult proposition to pass up.