Tigers Trade Idea Sees $50 Million Outfield Bat Acquired For Pitching Prospects

The Detroit Tigers are picking up where they left off last season, when they went from a 62-66 record on Aug. 22 to win 24 of their last 34 games and grab a Wild Card berth.

Coming into this season, the Tigers looked to be crippled by a series of injuries, including most recently to Kerry Carpenter, boasting the third-best OPS in the Detroit lineup (.803), who missed time last week with a hamstring strain.

Carpenter got back in the lineup quickly, but outfielders Parker Meadows, Matt Vierling, Manuel Margot and Wenceel Pérez have missed all or most of the season so far with various ailments.

Nonetheless, Detroit is off to an 18-11 start, the best record in the American League and, of course, good enough for first place in the AL Central Division.

Clearly the Tigers need a new outfielder, and preferably one who can bring offense as well as defense, if they hope to sustain their early-season success. Toward the end of spring training, Zachary Rymer of Bleacher Report proposed the idea that Detroit would “come out of nowhere to get Luis Robert Jr. from the White Sox.”

Robert, a 27-year-old native of Cuba, has played all six years of his career with the White Sox earning an All-Star spot in 2023. Injuries have hampered him ever since, but when healthy Robert is capable of Gold Glove defense, as he proved in his rookie 2020 season, and an OPS over .800 at the plate, which he showed in 2021 and 2023.

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Before his big league debut in 2020, Robert inked a six-year, $50 million contract extension with the White Sox — but that runs out after this season. The White Sox hold club options for $20 million per year over the next two seasons, but with both the club and Robert struggling, it seems unlikely Chicago will pull the trigger on another $40 million for one player.

But the Tigers could certainly use Robert. According to ESPN’s longtime MLB reporter David Schoenfield, if they want to acquire a new outfield bat, they have three pitching prospects who could be packaged to get him out of Chicago.

Those are:

-Jaden Hamm, a righty who was Detroit’s 2023 fifth round draft pick and is now the No. 8 overall prospect in the Tigers’ system. With Jackson Jobe elevated to the major league level, that makes Hamm the top minor league pitching prospect the Tigers have.

-Troy Melton, a 2022 fourth-rounder who currently boasts a sterling 1.69 ERA over 16 innings in four starts for the Double-A Erie SeaWolves and is listed by MLB Pipeline as the organization’s No. 11 overall prospect.

-Jake Miller, a 23-year-old southpaw taken in the eighth round of the 2022 draft. Miller has thrown 17 innings over four starts for Erie with a 2.12 ERA, and is listed as Detroit’s 16th overall prospect.

All three are currently in the SeaWolves rotation, making the trio easy to scout for the White Sox if they consider trading Robert for any combination of the three promising hurlers.

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