Tigers President Scott Harris Fires Back at Critics Who Say He Botched the Tarik Skubal Trade
Detroit Tigers president Scott Harris does not care what you think about the Tarik Skubal trade. He wants you to know it anyway.
Harris spoke to reporters after the MLB trade deadline and pushed back on the widespread public sentiment that the Los Angeles Dodgers stole Skubal from the Tigers without giving up their top prospects. It was not a subtle defense. It was a full-on rebuttal that Harris seemed to have rehearsed in his head for two days.
“We came into this very well prepared,” Harris said, per Alden Gonzalez. “We came into this with a firm idea of the type of deal that we wanted to ultimately land. And we had a deep understanding of what every organization had to offer. I think there is a unique dynamic with a player like Tarik Skubal.”
He continued. “Markets at the deadline for the top players are just different than the rest of the market. So I understand the intuition that, ‘Hey you’re supposed to wait until the very last second on a deal and then pull a trigger at the very last second to maximize a return.’ That’s not how markets for the top players work.”
Then the kicker. “I’m very confident that we absolutely maximized the return we could get for Tarik Skubal.”
OK, Scott. That is a lot of words to say “trust me.”
The problem with Harris’s defense is not what he said. It is what fans could see with their own eyes. The Boston Red Sox surrendered a bigger prospect package for Adley Rutschman than the Dodgers gave up for the best pitcher in baseball. Rutschman is a good catcher. Skubal is a two-time Cy Young winner and the most valuable trade chip of the entire deadline. If a bat-first catcher costs more than a franchise ace, either Boston got fleeced, or Detroit did not push hard enough.
Harris insists there was no team hiding in the shadows waiting to swoop in with a bigger offer. He said Skubal was the player holding up the rest of the league, and once the Tigers pulled the trigger, everything else moved. Fine. But that framing conveniently supports his side of the story. Multiple executives in other front offices have told reporters they were shocked at the return.
The conspiracy theory floating around is that the league quietly agreed to let the Dodgers land Skubal to avoid a bidding war that would have destroyed everyone else’s ability to add pitching. That is impossible to prove and probably not true in the literal sense. But when the biggest player of the deadline goes for a package that ranks below the Adley Rutschman trade, and the Tigers president has to spend twenty minutes explaining how markets for top players work, fans are going to ask questions.
Detroit needed to rebuild. That is fine. They just did not need to look like they were the last team in the room to figure out that Skubal was worth more.
Scott Harris can call it maximum return. The rest of the league knows what it looks like.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
