Tigers made quiet minor league trade with Blue Jays after the July 30 deadline

The Tigers, to no one's surprise, were sellers at the trade deadline. They let go of four key players: Carson Kelly, Andrew Chafin, Mark Canha, and Jack Flaherty for a handful of prospects/minor leaguers in return, basically hoisting the white flag on the rest of their season and telling fans they'd go back to the drawing board for next year.

All of the trades made sense for a team that will not be going to the postseason this year. Flaherty and Co. are all in walk years, and represented affordable contracts (and upside) to be passed off to another team. However, getting rid of Flaherty and Chafin made the Tigers' pitching deficit even worse. The rotation went down to two, and the bullpen lost a valuable lefty.

It's been clear that they're scrambling, even if management won't be quick to admit it. They called up relievers Brenan Hanifee and Sean Guenther from Triple-A (Guenther has since been sent back down), two names only the most serious of minor-league watchers might know.

AJ Hinch said that the Tigers were going to figure out how to make up for the lack of pitching internally, but hope for that strategy is nil given how we've already seen it start to play out.

However, maybe the Tigers were sort of planning on this being an issue, because they also made a low key addition a couple days after the deadline had passed: cash considerations to the Blue Jays in exchange for minor-league reliever Troy Watson (subscription required).

Tigers make a minor-league trade with Blue Jays for reliever Troy Watson

Okay, maybe this is good news. The Tigers saw that they thinned out their already threadbare pitching staff at the deadline, didn't have great options on their own Triple-A team, and took steps to mitigate the blow. Although it would've been nicer if they'd thought about that while they were trading away some of their bigger guns, anything helps, right?

Maybe not. Watson is 27 and is still waiting for his major league debut. He's been in the Jays' system since 2018 and looked pretty good for a few years, but then he got to Double-A and things took a turn. In 2023, he pitched 50 innings in Double-A for a 5.58 ERA. He was promoted to Triple-A that year and did well in just under 10 innings, but then he turned around and put up an 8.61 ERA over 46 innings this season.

What are the Tigers doing here? It'd be hard to say that there's much upside for a 27-year-old pitcher who's struggled through the two highest levels of the minors. If they call him up as another Hanifee or Guenther-like cameo, then we'll know they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel.