The Detroit Tigers are in a rebuild. The team knows it. The fans know it. The rest of the league knows it.
As the July 31 trade deadline approaches, general manager Al Avila will have some big decisions to make. Nick Castellanos is about to become a free agent, and Joran Zimmerman and Shane Greene are just a year behind him. Avila has a chance to really boost the rebuild process if he can swing quality deals for all three.
The current MLB odds at SBD show just how far away from contending this team is. The Tigers have the same odds as the Royals and Orioles to win the World Series at nearly 5000/1. While that’s kind of an academic exercise at this point, with all three teams more than 20 games out of a playoff spot, Detroit’s preseason projections were nearly as bad.
They started the year with the third-lowest win total and the fourth-worst odds to win the 2019 World Series.
The performance on the field has simply been abysmal, to the point where they are falling short of the extremely low preseason forecast. Their -189 run difference is the worst in the entire MLB.
Yes, it’s worse than the historically inept Orioles, who are at -187.
I don’t mean to dwell on this bleak season. There are brighter days ahead. But it’s important to note where the starting point is for the Tigers if we are considering the 2019 trade deadline as a new ground zero.
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There may be some temptation for Avila to hold onto Boyd and Greene, given how well they have pitched this year and the fact that they still have a year of team control.
The argument is that this year’s Tigers team was doomed by injuries and never had a fair chance to exceed expectations. Michael Fulmer, Josh Harrison, Tyson Ross, Matt, Moore, Grayson Greiner: the list of significant players who have missed huge swaths of time is long and, for lack of a better word, distinguished.
If the team retains Boyd and Greene, plus has a fully healthy roster next year, there’s a chance they could surprise in the not-overly-daunting AL Central, right?
That’s still a longshot, and it’s why Avila would be better served to market, not just Castellanos, but also Boyd and Zimmerman as aggressively as possible.
That doesn’t mean take a bad deal for either of them. But it does mean that he shouldn’t hold out hope for an unrealistic run in 2020.
This team is more than a year away from contending, and the value on both Boyd and Zimmerman is depreciating with each passing day. If Detroit holds onto them past this year’s trade deadline, there will be a sharp decline in their value, as they will then be players on expiring contracts.
