Tigers fans may re-think criticism after Scott Harris' candid trade deadline insight

Scott Harris' post-trade deadline press conference yielded a soundbite that both fans and the media would go on to throw back in his face during the Tigers' August-September skid: "A lot of the moves we passed on felt like moves that were going to haunt us for many years to come."

It seemed like typical Harris/Tigers prospect hoarding, and the vast majority of Detroit's pitching acquisitions struggling thereafter only intensified scrutiny. The Tigers do have one of the best, if not the best, farm system in baseball, but surely there are redundancies — players they could've given up outside of their prized top three prospects to get a big bat they desperately seemed to need when they posted a .292 record in September and lost their grasp on the AL Central.

Harris' typical vagueness throughout the rest of the year didn't help matters in the slightest either. However, in his 2025 postmortem presser on Monday, he provided a little more insight.

He didn't name names, but he did say that "the players that were most closely connected to us via the media would have cost either player on our postseason roster plus additional pieces or one of our top prospect plus additional pieces. [...] Some of those players didn't perform at all down the stretch, would've been a free agent in two months, and would've cost a player on our postseason roster that actually performed better than the player we (could've) acquired and was controllable in the future."

Scott Harris' uncharacteristic openness about 2025 trade deadline has Tigers fans rethinking criticism

Speculation about who those players were has run wild since the press conference, but most signs point to Eugenio Suárez, who the Tigers never showed public interest in but was repeatedly connected to Detroit. He ended up going to the Mariners in exchange for three prospects, hit just .188 in August and September, and will be a free agent when the Mariners' postseason is over.

The postseason piece they would've had to give up in exchange for him, some Tigers fans theorize, is Troy Melton, who pitched eight one-run innings throughout the ALDS and is clearly in line for a job in the starting rotation next year.

Of course, there are still reasons to be critical of Harris' trade deadline when only Kyle Finnegan proved to be the only truly valuable addition and the Tigers still failed to lock up the AL Central (though their Wild Card win over the Guardians does sort of render that failure moot), but now that we have more insight into his thought process, it does make more sense. We can put the pitchforks down (for now).