SPORTS

Henning: Tigers deal with delayed trade plans

Lynn Henning
The Detroit News
Tigers general manager Al Avila and manager Brad Ausmus might be dealing with a different roster next season.

National Harbor, Md. – In terms of trappings and appearances, everything this week has been consistent with past Tigers presentations at baseball’s Winter Meetings.

The Tigers have their traditional team suite, this time on the eighth floor of the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center by the Potomac River’s shore. They have, per usual, a full crew on hand: general manager Al Avila and all of his front-office gang, including scouts, development staff, and Avila’s celebrity advisers, Al Kaline, Willie Horton, Alan Trammell, and Jim Leyland.

They sit, the main guys, at a work table inside their suite at the end of each business day and update media in general fashion on the day’s conversations and trade scuttlebutt. Avila is seated in the group’s middle, flanked by his manager, Brad Ausmus, by assistant GMs David Chadd and John Westhoff, and pro scouting director Scott Bream, among assorted others.

And then they talk, with Avila speaking 99 percent of the time, about a Tigers offseason that has not gone quite according to script.

It all began last week when a new owners-players contract was hammered together that greatly pleased the owners but didn’t help the Tigers. Not in terms of payroll, anyway.

The luxury tax was raised only slightly and tougher percentage penalties were applied. The net result was to put more of a squeeze on a Tigers team that is paying $200-million-plus and sits, even with the new contract, well over the $195-million limit. The Tigers’ bind is that they, proportionally, get whacked harder than other offenders when Detroit is a mid-market team paying major-market fines for being too generous with its salaries.

The Tigers are to blame here, of course. No one forced owner Mike Ilitch to spend lavishly on players. But other clubs (the well-heeled Red Sox, Yankees, Dodgers, etc.) have an easier time pushing the throttle on payroll and paying Commissioner Rob Manfred’s speeding tickets.

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The Tigers are feeling effects beyond tariffs on salaries they had hoped to chop. Cost-cuts, though, weren’t the goal quite this autumn, and winter, as much as the Tigers had been keen on trading expensive players for badly needed younger talent.

But with harsher punishment in place for the money-throwers, and with Manfred arm-twisting clubs like the Dodgers to slash spending that upsets his vision of a competitive landscape, teams have been stepping back from taking on fat contracts. They’ve been focusing instead on those terms you often here, “team control” being a favorite when having a relatively inexpensive key player locked in well ahead of free agency is every big-league club’s roster dream.

It helps explain why a pitcher such as Justin Verlander is still untouched when, during many past Winter Meetings, a superstar of his stature would have been quite the conversation piece for inquiring clubs.

Verlander makes $84 million spread over the next three seasons. Not a lot of takers there when spending is being policed and penalized even as big-league baseball had another record year of revenue ($10 billion).

Add to the above another bad bit of timing for the Tigers.

This autumn’s auction block is loaded with right-handed power hitters. That’s fairly rare, at least in terms of scope. The net result is that an outfielder, J.D. Martinez, who in earlier years would have been viewed like a treasure chest awash in gold doubloons, has been pretty much ignored.

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The Tigers will lose him to free agency in a year. Draft-pick compensation isn’t what it once was, and is even less for a team that’s been naughty with its luxury-tax ledger. It means the Tigers must either trade Martinez now or, more likely, hope for a more ravenous marketplace at next July’s trade deadline.

But that begets another no-win scenario for the Tigers.

They will prefer to move Martinez, as much as can be determined today, only if they’re not serious mid-season playoff contenders. And if they’re not in contention in July, it means a cash-draining 2017 club will have been an expensive bust.

Or, say they are in contention, as they were last July. They can hold off and shoot for an October playoff surprise. Or, they can just miss, as they did this season, or perhaps find they did nothing more than land a one-game wildcard invitation.

That dangerous spin of a roulette wheel kept them from making valuable long-term trades?

The Tigers will be realistic about the above. But anyone can see how complicated life could become for a team that wants to avoid a complete, ground-up rebuilding project and turn some of its older inventory into fresher, younger talent for a team’s long haul.

The Tigers traded much of their farm during the Dave Dombrowski era, when a World Series was realistically in the picture. They also coughed up a trunk-load of early draft picks that are seriously clobbering the Tigers today.

So, making deals that unload expensive billboard talent for younger blood was essential for a team that, until the past few weeks, had every expectation of making healthy swaps.

Now, the landscape has changed. At least from December’s appearances.

This is proving tough when the Tigers still aren’t sure about center field in 2017, when they have next-to-no infield position prospects in the system, and when there are too few bright-light pitchers on the farm.

It could be rugged on a Tigers business office, as well. Folks there are heading into the thick of ticket-selling time for season packages. Those sales are heavily reliant on fans feeling good about next year’s club and its exciting new faces.

Except at the moment there aren’t any new faces.

Will that be a 12- or 25-game ticket package, sir?

Avila still has time to deal, especially when the trade mart looks as if it will be a late-bloomer. It’s also possible, with decent health, a 2017 Tigers team with good young starting pitching in its equation could become quite the Central Division surprise.

It’s possible. Lots of outcomes are possible. The Tigers are trying to stay positive as the Winter Meetings approach gavel-time. And even as some pleasing offseason plans appear, at the very least, to have been delayed.

Twitter @lynn_henning