Today in the Detroit Tigers and trade deadline talks: Money.
And no matter which way you look at it, money remains the biggest factor influencing the team and their trade plans.
General manager Al Avila has been up front about the Tigers' desire to scale back payroll. But in nearly every next breath, he’s said the front office is under no mandate from ownership to cut finances at the expense of acquiring top prospects.
But such is the situation they are currently stuck in, less than a week away from the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline. According to multiple persons with knowledge of their talks, the Tigers have set a high asking prices on their available players and have yet to show a willingness to eat a substantial enough sum of salary for talks to gain serious traction.
As of this evening, nothing was imminent on the trade front.
Perhaps no player embodies the Tigers’ predicament better than Justin Verlander.
Verlander is owed roughly $70 million over the next two seasons, the biggest hurdle in making a move. The team is certainly interested in trading him, but doesn’t appear interested in doing so at any sort of a discounted rate in terms of prospect return.
They would be willing to eat the remaining money – about $12 million – on Verlander’s contract this season, but no more. Their stance is not wrong: At his best, Verlander is a premium pitcher, one who just last season finished second in American League Cy Young Award voting. He is a face of the franchise player, perhaps a future Hall of Famer, and the optics of trading such a player for either an underwhelming prospect return or by paying a sizable sum will not sit well with the fan base.