It’s been a little over two years since Scott Harris was hired as the Tigers’ president of baseball operations, and it took a little time to assess his plan of attack.
Coming off a surprising playoff appearance in 2024, and one that was fueled by the one of the youngest rosters in Major League Baseball, Harris’ plan is coming into focus, and it’s drawing rave reviews from around the league.
“Generally speaking, they seem to have an idea of what they’re doing,” said Kiley McDaniel, ESPN’s chief MLB prospect analyst. "Not to say that other regimes didn’t know what they were doing. But they have an idea and they’re executing it and they have an edge and (are) putting resources toward it.
“And you see what the plan is and where things are going.”
“To use economic terms, they are finding value in every little pocket around the league,” said McDaniel, who was a scout for more than a decade before joining ESPN in 2020. "They’re not paying retail value for free agents the way maybe Javier Báez was (six years, $140 million).
"They’re just generally doing a good job, which, again, sounds very basic. It’s not basic. It is difficult."
The Tigers are unanimously viewed as having a top-five farm system, after a pair of promising drafts under Harris and Co.
More: Tigers reach ‘high-water mark’ in Baseball America’s farm-system rankings for 2025
Of course, just having a good farm system isn’t the end-all. In the heyday under Dave Dombrowski, the Tigers didn’t have a good farm system, because they used prospects as currency to acquire stars.
The Tigers are in a position to start trading from its surplus of prospects, as Harris acknowledged at the start of the offseason, but they haven’t pulled the trigger on any major deals on that front. At least, not yet. Their biggest trade under Harris involving sending the veteran Flaherty to the Los Angeles Dodgers at last year’s deadline, when the Tigers were waving the white flag, and correctly so. That trade netted them perhaps their starting shortstop of the future in Trey Sweeney and catcher Thayron Liranzo (a top-100 prospect by some analysts), the Tigers made the playoffs anyway, and they got Flaherty back, too, recently agreeing to a two-year, $35-million contract for a reunion.
