Detroit Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris is not interested in hearing that he botched the Tarik Skubal trade to the Dodgers. He said as much publicly on Tuesday.
Harris pushed back on the reporting from multiple outlets suggesting the Tigers could have gotten more for the two-time Cy Young Award winner, and specifically defended the package Detroit received: outfielder Zyhir Hope and right-handed pitchers River Ryan and Brady Smith.
“We got the return we wanted, from the team that valued him the most, and we did it on our timeline,” Harris said. “The idea that we left value on the table is not accurate.”
Here is where the argument gets complicated. Skubal is a pending free agent who was going to walk after 2026, and everyone in baseball knew it. His agent, Scott Boras, was not going to negotiate an extension with a mid-market team that had already told Skubal how they valued him. The Tigers were trading a rental of a top-five pitcher in the sport, which is a smaller ask than trading a controllable ace.
Hope is a legitimate top-40 prospect. River Ryan has a shot to be a mid-rotation starter within two years. Brady Smith is a lower-ceiling but higher-floor arm who could pitch out of a big league bullpen next season. That is a real return. It is not a Chris Sale trade. But it is also not a nothing trade, and the industry consensus that Detroit “got fleeced” is more about the emotion of losing Skubal than the actual math of the deal.
Where Harris is more vulnerable is on the timing. He waited until Saturday night before calling the Dodgers, which is later than a lot of teams start their conversations. There is at least a fair argument that if he had opened the market up 48 hours earlier, the Yankees, Phillies, Cubs, and Blue Jays might have been dragged into a bidding war that pushed the price higher.
Instead, Detroit dealt with LA quickly, took the offer that was on the table, and walked away. That is a defensible strategy. It is also the strategy that always looks worse in hindsight when the winning bidder is a team like the Dodgers who could probably have been pushed harder.
Tigers fans have every right to be frustrated. Skubal was the face of the franchise, the guy who was supposed to lead them to another postseason run, and now he is throwing his fastball for a team that already has three All-Star starters. Watching him win a World Series ring in Dodger blue in October is going to sting for years.
But Harris was not going to let Skubal walk for a compensatory pick. That would have been actual malpractice. Getting a top prospect and two potentially useful arms for what would have been a two-month rental is a fair outcome for a rebuilding team.
The next year will tell the story. If Hope hits and River Ryan turns into a starter, the trade will look fine. If the return busts, this will haunt Harris’s tenure.
For now, though, he is right to push back. The trade was defensible. Losing Skubal was not.
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.
