Harris explains Tigers' decision to sell, why they took Dodgers' Skubal offer

Scott Harris said he planned weeks ago for the potential for the Tigers buying or selling at the Trade Deadline. It wasn’t a judgment on the team he put together, but a matter of being prepared to go either way.

But the Tigers’ president of baseball operations said he didn’t decide which way to go until their homestand that ended in defeat last Wednesday, a blown lead with Tarik Skubal on the mound for what ultimately became his final start in a Tigers uniform.

From there, he said, he asked some key questions:

“Did I put this organization in a position to be aggressive and add to this team at the Deadline,” he said. “Did I position this organization to trade a significant part of our future for the present to add to this team? I think the answer, based on the first 112 games of this season, was no.

“I don't think that we played well enough, I don't think I did enough for this organization to justify trading a significant part of our future for the present. That's sort of the obvious question that everybody asks themselves at the Deadline.”

But there was another question to that, one of opportunity cost.

“Did I do enough to position this organization in a way that I could justify trading a significant part of the future just to keep this group together,” he said. “So, not to add to the group, to do nothing other than just keep this roster together? And I think the answer to that question was also no.”

In other words, he said, he couldn’t justify missing a chance to add young players in trades to keep a team together with iffy chances at the postseason.

“If you think about what we did this week in making the trades that we did, if we didn't make those trades, we essentially would be trading Zyhir Hope and River Ryan and Kash Mayfield and Brady Smith, and trading those players just to keep this group together,” he said. “And I don't think, based on the way that we played over the first 112 games, that it made sense to do that. And so, once I came to peace with the answer to those questions being no, I thought it was in the best interest of this organization to make the trades that we made this week.”

It was not a decision he made lightly, and he took responsibility for the team being there.

“I wanted to give this team every opportunity to make a really compelling case that we shouldn't do this. We just didn't make that case,” he said. “It's not on the players. It's not on the coaches. It's on me. If there's anyone you should point to, it's me. We didn't collectively make this case compelling enough to add to this team, and we didn't make a case compelling enough to not subtract from this team.”

From there, he gauged the market on Tarik Skubal. By Saturday, he said, he had the best offers and ultimately chose the Dodgers. It didn’t come down to the Deadline, he said, because it didn’t have to.

“I understand the intuition that you're supposed to wait until the very last second on a deal and then pull the trigger to maximize the return,” Harris said. “That's not how markets for the top players work. There was no team that was pursuing Tarik Skubal that was waiting to see if they could get someone else and then pivoting to Tarik if they didn't get him. There weren't these market forces that were ultimately affecting what each team's appetite was for a package to land Skubal. That was very clear in all my conversations with the teams that we talked to.”

According to MLB Pipeline research, the Skubal deal for Hope, Ryan and Smith was the first trade since at least 2004 that involved two Top 100 prospects for a rental. The Nationals received two – pitcher Josiah Gray and catcher Keibert Ruiz – from the Dodgers for Max Scherzer in 2021, but that deal also sent Trea Turner to Los Angeles.

Asked if there were teams bidding against each other for Skubal, Harris said, “There was a bidding war. There were a lot of organizations involved, and there wasn't any need to stretch it any further. The organizations that were involved were extremely aggressive, and they put what I believe to be their max offers. And then they added to those offers, also, and almost got to a point of audible pain when they actually produced their best bold offers. And they gave them to us and we pulled the trigger.

“Respectfully, the notion that we should have waited 24 or 48 hours later and extracted more value, that's garbage. That's not how these negotiations work. The organizations that were involved were extremely aggressive and we got to their best [offer] and we chose the best one, and we are extremely excited about the one we took. We think these players have a chance to be really good Major League players for a long time with the Tigers.”