Lakeland, Fla. — Inspect the Tigers’ run-starved, victory-thin roster in June of 2022 and it puzzles why so few international names, signed originally by Detroit, now play for manager AJ Hinch’s crew.
There are two: Gregory Soto, who is the team’s closer. Harold Castro, who is more a backup than starter.
The Tigers own the worst offense in all of baseball (runs, OPS) and are so bad in their run-scoring futility, they’re threatening to etch some ugly history.
The raw truth is they own a roster that for years has been desperate for muscle, which invites questions as well as comparisons. MLB teams, lots of them, have healthier lineups, with international clout one way to measure a batting order’s punch. The Tigers’ Central Division neighbors offer perspective.
► White Sox: Jose Abreu: He socked the Tigers again Monday with a pair of homers. A first baseman with a career WAR of 28 and a slew of past Most Valuable Player votes is in his ninth season of steady swings for the White Sox.
► Royals: Salvador Perez, catcher: Career WAR of 30.4, with seven All-Star Game tickets.
► Indians: Jose Ramirez, third baseman: Ten years with the Indians, three times in the top six of MVP finalists, and having another whopping season in Cleveland.
► Twins: Jorge Polanco, 2B: He is 28 and a year ago smashed 33 homers for the Twins. He has been described at various times through his nine seasons in Minnesota as the team’s heart and soul. Luis Arraez, 25, plays first base and entered Tuesday’s games hitting .362.
► Jose Altuve at Houston; Ozzie Albies and Ronald Acuna, Jr., with the Braves; Juan Soto, the Nationals’ gem; Wander Franco, a hotshot rookie with the Rays, which also employ Randy Arozarena, whom the Rays got from St. Louis after the Cardinals originally signed him. Seattle’s Julio Rodriguez is a rookie with franchise-player upside.
It’s a long parade: Rafael Devers, Xander Bogaerts, Yordan Alvarez, Luis Robert. Robert is joined by two more White Sox sharpies — Eloy Jimenez and Yoan Moncada — who came to the Sox via trades. Consider, as something of a model for Detroit, the Blue Jays, who while in town last weekend flaunted their Latin American plumage.
Asians, too, are sprinkled throughout the MLB realm, including a two-way jewel named Shohei Ohtani with the Angels. The Tigers, for reasons that are largely regional, have had little Asian help, and today have zero Asians on their 40-man roster or at any level in the minors.
Detroit’s baseball crowd might ask, fairly, why the Tigers beg for everyday position talent that could have been helped by some international bats of the above brand. And how that talent might have factored in changing the tenor to a sour 2022.
In fact, there have been breakthroughs.
It’s simply that those players now work for teams other than Detroit.
► Willy Adames: He plays shortstop for the Brewers, has 11 homers in 40 games, was 16th in MVP voting in 2021, and, at age 26, has been a plus-talent since the Tigers first signed him a decade ago. Adames, had he not been dealt in 2014 for David Price, could have saved the Tigers their offseason investment of $140 million in Javier Báez.
► Eugenio Suarez: A third baseman, Suarez averaged 27 homers a year from 2015-21, all after the Tigers dealt him following the 2014 season — along with prospect pitcher Jonathon Crawford — for a lamentable starter named Alfredo Simon.
► Avisail Garcia: Less dynamic than Adames and Suarez, Garcia is a right fielder with a solid, back-end bat, which is the brand of player the Tigers often have been missing during their eternal rebuild. Eleven years he has played in the big leagues, first with Detroit, and later with the White Sox, Brewers, and Marlins. Ironically, Garcia was trade bait the Tigers used in 2013 to get Jose Iglesias, who was supposed to have been Detroit’s long-term answer at shortstop.
There were others, of less celebrity, who were sent away in lower-profile deals: Javier Betancourt, Manny Pina, Domingo Leyba, Danry Vasquez.
Any focus on international players, and on those the Tigers have shipped elsewhere, is in fact part of a broader conversation about the Tigers, and not only in 2022.
What can be gleaned from probes spanning months — front-office requests, roster inspections, individual club assessments from MLB beat writers, and conversations with those who demand anonymity due to the sensitivity (or, politics, perhaps) of the international market — is this cut-to-the-chase appraisal of the Tigers:
They rest somewhere in a lower, middle-of-the-pack grouping of MLB teams in their international harvest. They are nowhere near a top tier: Dodgers, Astros, Yankees, Blue Jays, Red Sox, Padres, Rays, etc., with something of a consensus in agreement there.
Neither are they crowding lower rungs occupied by the Orioles, Pirates, A’s — and until they changed direction — Marlins.
The Tigers say all of this will change — in a few short years. They have hunted bigger game since 2017, spending vast chunks of their MLB-policed bonus pool on blue-chippers who have wowed scouts even outside Detroit’s sphere: shortstop Cristian Santana ($2.95 million), Roberto Campos ($2.85 million), and shortstop Javier Osorio ($2.2 million).
More: Roberto Campos starting to show why Tigers spent big bucks on Cuban outfielder
They are especially high on an overall wave of kids 19 and younger. As much, anyway, as confidence can rest on prospects so tender.
The problem can be getting anyone to talk about it.
Al Avila, the Tigers general manager, deferred all questions to Tom Moore, who directs international scouting for the Tigers. Moore did speak, for nearly 90 minutes, during a May interview in his TigerTown office, in Lakeland, Florida.
That conversation, on the record, is not commonplace in MLB circles. And all because the international market is so complex, so subterranean, so filled with realities a realm away from the more up-front, more advanced, more regulated domestic draft, which features a primary difference-maker:
International talent can, and essentially must, be signed when players are 16. Players in the United States are drafted at least two years later, when they finish high school, or later in their college years. Domestic scouts see players in uniform settings and games. There are showcase events and summer stages, such as the Cape Cod League, over and above season schedules.
Players across the Dominican Republic are generally advertised at camps run by buscons — trainers, or handlers, as it were. Those players now include Venezuelan teens who once upon a time were part of youth leagues and U.S.-like competition on diamonds across the vast Venezuelan baseball terrain.
But that was all before the past decade. Venezuela has been ripped by economic collapse and systemic breakdowns. Its top teen talent now tends to endure visa red tape and migrate to the Dominican for training, teaching, and display to MLB scouts who work there.
There is, however, nothing overly streamlined about scouting the Dominican Republic now that it functions as a basic mass-producer of Latin American talent.
Negotiations, cultural machinations, trying to find out where the money to a teenage Latin talent is actually going — it is all part of a byzantine, even sordid, landscape that has spurred the likely arrival of a MLB International Draft as soon as 2024.
An important, sobering, reality for the Tigers is that their domestic draft has been about as skinny as the international market in bringing to Detroit everyday position talent. Only now is the roster changing, with Spencer Torkelson, Riley Greene — and possibly Ryan Kreidler, Colt Keith, Dillon Dingler, and others — in the present or near-future mix.
Pitching is a different story. Depth has been built there and is of such abundance the Tigers likely, if not inevitably, will be trading some of their arms for badly needed bats.
But it is those lack of bats, swung by daily position talents, that have been particularly scarce the past 25 years — and even longer. In the late 1990s and into the new millennium, the few big names signed and delivered to Detroit were Bobby Higginson, Curtis Granderson, and Brandon Inge. That was about it. They were matched, at best, on the international side by Omar Infante and Juan Encarnacion.
The result was self-evident: The Tigers had to go elsewhere for hitters who fueled their playoff-rich heyday from 2006-2014. Pudge Rodriguez, Magglio Ordonez, Carlos Guillen, Placido Polanco — and, ultimately, Magglio Ordonez — were everyday talents delivered by way of free agency or via trades. The MLB marketplace then was more bountiful, for reasons that were tactical, or even quirky, such as when players like Rodriguez and Ordonez were approachable because of injury history that spurred contract gambles by late owner Mike Ilitch.
Other than Granderson and Inge — and ace pitcher Justin Verlander — the Tigers’ U.S. drafts weren’t overly involved in forging those playoff teams that made it to two World Series. And neither was the international side, with only a couple of Tigers signees boosting those teams: Fernando Rodney, a back-end reliever who for several seasons was a staple; and Ramon Santiago, a steady and versatile back-up infielder.
It can be argued the Tigers have gotten bare-bones position returns from domestic and international bins since their last bumper crop, in the ‘70s, when Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Lance Parrish, and Kirk Gibson helped forge Detroit’s last world champion. It was a similar story in their previous world championship year, 1968, when the Tigers’ lineup was dotted with players the Tigers had signed: Al Kaline, Willie Horton, Bill Freehan, Mickey Stanley, Jim Northrup, Dick McAuliffe, Don Wert.
That sub-species to the domestic draft, the international market, has, in too many years, seen the Tigers be all but stoned. Not a single international player today signed by Detroit has cracked Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects.
The Tigers repeat that a new corps of Latin talent will bring better times, and lineups, ahead — thanks not only to Santana, Campos, and Osorio, but because more skilled (and in most cases, more highly paid) kids are maturing: Manuel Sequera, Eliezer Alfonzo, Wenceel Perez, Jose De La Cruz, Adinso Reyes, Abel Bastidas, Lazaro Benitez, Daneurys De La Cruz, and Raudy de los Santos.
Pitchers include Keider Montero, Cleiverth Perez, Ulices Campos, Gabriel Ramos, Wilmer Fenelon, Jorge Boyer, Rolando Sirit, and Rayner Castillo.
Some of the group might flourish. Or, as big-league realities go, it could be another crew of kids who mostly don’t pan out.
Moore sat late last month in his third-floor office at TigerTown, high above the complex that includes Marchant Stadium and five minor-league training fields.
“I’m not just saying it — we have a lot of talent,” Moore began, minutes after he had returned from a back field and intra-squad game featuring mostly young, Latin talent. “Just looking from our (high-Single A) West Michigan team down, there’s a lot of reason for excitement.”
The qualifier is age. Betting on teens is right there with buying a power-ball ticket.
“On average, once a signing class (overall MLB crop) pretty much has matured, there’s 50 or 60 players who have gotten to the big leagues — and there could be five or 10 who are average contributors or better,” Moore said. “When we look at it as a whole, getting a player who is at least an average contributor is a huge score.”
Detroit’s scorecard in Latin America can be viewed in the context of three periods of recent history:
► 2007-2011: There was little governance from MLB on what teams could spend then on international talent. The Tigers were relatively quiet, in concert with most mid-market teams, and their returns proved it. Not much in measurable talent arrived from Latin America or elsewhere, although Avisail Garcia was one Tigers hit.
►2012-2016: “Soft caps” arrived. MLB teams were allotted bonus pools based on how the big-league team finished, much as draft orders in all sports are established. The Tigers were in the middle then of a playoff-steady ascent and, because they tended to play deep into October, they had among MLB’s smallest bonus pools. Still, some help, big help — as other teams were to learn — came during these years: Adames, Suarez, and even Hernan Perez were among Tigers signed then. They later were sent away via trade or (Perez) waiver wire.
►2017-2021: Firm bonus pools arrived, but with money more evenly distributed. Teams were allowed to trade up to 75% of their pools in any deals with other MLB clubs.
Note that the 2012-2016 era was a time when the Tigers, responsibly or foolishly, played by the rules. Some teams — hello, Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, and even other clubs from lesser altitudes — loaded up in select years, blowing past their bonus pools. They didn’t mind paying 100% tax on their excesses. They didn’t mind having their next two years of international payouts capped at $300,000 as a penalty.
The Yankees in 2014, as a spotlight example, had a $2,193,100 international allowance. They signed 52 players, 10 of which were among MLB Pipeline’s Top 30, and paid $34 million in bonuses and penalties.
As perhaps Exhibit A in how risky are international signings, largely due to age, the Yankees learned an expensive lesson. Not one of those players from 2014 ever reached the big leagues.
The Red Sox were even more daring. They signed in 2015 a 19-year-old Cuban defector, Moncada, for $31.5 million — and promptly forked over to the MLB vault in New York another $31.5 million as penalty for obliterating their bonus allowance. For the Red Sox, the total Moncada bill came to $63 million. He later was a prime piece in a colossal trade that sent White Sox ace Chris Sale to Boston.
A year before the Red Sox grabbed Moncada, they gambled $72.5 million on another Cuban defector, Rusney Castillo, who then was 26. He ended up playing in 99 big-league games before disappearing from MLB fields in 2016.
Only the richest MLB clubs tend to take these risks. The Tigers, who went far beyond market status in adding big-league payroll during Ilitch’s twilight years, were docile when the occasional, older defector, such as Moncada or Castillo, hit MLB’s showroom. They also stayed within the chalk-lines during that 2012-2016 interlude when so many teams basically said: “Bonus caps? What bonus caps?”
Moore doubtless would have loved for the Tigers to have splurged. No scouting director, domestic or international, scoffs at money. But he didn’t buck his boss then, or now.
“Every organization has decisions to make,” Moore said, accepting past and present realities. “Here are the resources we have — here’s the money we can spend.
“I think, for some teams, that (international splurges) was where their money was being pooled.
“As far as our ownership, our front office, we’ve had an incredible amount of support to do the things we’ve needed to do: international scouting, domestic draft, big-league payroll. But you run into a situation where there are not unlimited resources. In terms of where teams put their resources, there certainly is a disparity in clubs.
“As aggressive and generous as our ownership has been, you can’t spend in unlimited ways.”
Lynn Henning is a freelance writer and retired Detroit News sports reporter.
Coming Wednesday: Why Venezuela’s collapse particularly hurt Detroit; and how an International Draft, probably arriving in 2024, will affect the Tigers and all of baseball.