It’s been a busy week for Detroit Tigers general manager Al Avila.
He received a contract extension, and is now looking forward to this year’s MLB trade deadline, which falls on July 31. What are the team’s plans for their top traceable assets in Shane Greene, Matthew Boyd and Nicholas Castellanos?
According to Avila, he’s taking things slow.
“That’s hard to say,” Avila told the Jamie and Stoney Show on 97.1 The Ticket. “Right now there’s a lot of pitching available, particularly relievers, so it’s hard to say. I would say that I would expect interest in our pitchers, they’ve done very well. Obviously I’ve been in contact with a lot of GM’s. Nobody’s been overly aggressive, but I think it’s just because of the timing of it right now. I’ll know more coming out of this weekend, as far as how aggressive teams are going to be.
“I think Shane Greene put it in the right words, that any reliever that’s pitching well right now on a rebuilding team can obviously be a target. They’ve pitched well, so there’s reason to believe that there would be some interest.”
The Tigers are in desperate need of hitters, but what will Avila be able to produce?
“That’s true,” Avila acknowledged on the team’s need for hitters. “The position players right now, it’s one of those things where unless you see the stats across the board as far as on-base-percentage, OPS, your home runs, things of that nature, you tend to get nervous about it.”
“One thing that we’ve learned over the years is the pitching on the free agent market is really volatile. It’s very risky. Not only with us, but if you look across the league and other teams’ free agent pitching acquisitions, not all of them have always panned out very well. So that’s one thing we feel really good about, is homegrown pitching. We think we we have really high-end guys, and that’ll help us compete for a long time.
“Now, obviously we have to bring along some hitting. And we feel that wherever we are going to be deficient as far as hitting is concerned, we should be able to go out there on the free agent market and try to make an acquisition or two as things develop at the Major League level.”
