The Athletic has live coverage of the 2026 MLB Trade Deadline.SEATTLE — Two days after trading Tarik Skubal to the Los Angeles Dodgers, Detroit Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris was asked point-blank: Did the Tigers ever make a compelling offer to keep Skubal in Detroit?“We explored an extension once,” Harris said. “The response that I got from Tarik’s agent was pretty clear that he was intent on going to free agency and exploring the market, which is totally his right, and nobody should be upset about that. … It was very clear from the exchange what the intentions were. He deserved it. I expect him to be a free agent this winter, and we’ll see what happens from there.”Monday night, agent Scott Boras told The Athletic the Tigers presented this offer after 2024, Skubal’s first Cy Young season.“Scott informed me that he had offered a four-year contract to Tarik for $75 million,” Boras said. “I advised him that a great deal for the Tigers would be something with an eight-year length where he had two years to go until arbitration and another six (before) free agency.”Did the Tigers get enough back for Tarik Skubal?Eno Sarris and Derek VanRiperAccording to Boras, Harris indicated the Tigers were not willing to go that far. Boras said he never mentioned wanting to test free agency. The industry now expects Skubal to be worth upward of $300 million on the open market. For reasons like that, the majority of star Boras clients test free agency rather than negotiate extensions.Regardless of how it went down, it led to the events of the past few days, a trade deadline that could define Harris’ tenure in Detroit.Soon after the 6 p.m. ET trade deadline Monday, Harris sat on a video call with so much to explain. He wore a dark pullover but sat in front of a bright backdrop. Like so many baseball executives this time of the year, Harris looked drained.He kept talking for 38 minutes, unpacking his thoughts and unraveling the threads of his decisions.Past the halfway point of a disappointing season, Harris said he had been weighing how to approach the deadline for weeks, if not months, ever since the Tigers went 6-22 in May.At the center of it all was Skubal, a pitcher already with two Cy Young awards to his name.The reality of Skubal’s leaving after the season, combined with the fact the Tigers remain outside the playoff hunt, left the Tigers with little choice but to trade Skubal for the sizable return he could bring. The decision made sense. This is sometimes how great organizations are built.Still, Harris hoped to avoid a sell-off as he watched his team fight back from the brink in June and July. He said he did not make a definitive decision until last week, after the Tigers dropped two of three to the Baltimore Orioles at Comerica Park. The series finale was a 10-9 loss in 12 innings. The Tigers blew a 7-0 lead in what turned out to be Skubal’s final start in a Tigers uniform.“I wanted to give this team every opportunity to make a really compelling case that we shouldn’t do this,” Harris said. “And again, we just didn’t make that case. It’s not on the players; it’s not the coaches. It’s on me.”Harris soon traded Skubal to the Los Angeles Dodgers for outfield prospect Zyhir Hope and right-handed pitching prospects River Ryan and Brady Smith. All three are talented. Hope has a power-speed combo with an All-Star ceiling. Ryan, though often injured and already nearing 28 years old, has premium stuff and could pitch for the Tigers before the end of the season. Smith, too, has a starter’s arsenal and averaged 14.4 strikeouts per nine innings in Class A.The deal was complete late Saturday night. Per MLB.com, it marked the first time since at least 2004 that two top-100 prospects had been traded in exchange for a rental player.Despite this fact, pundits spent the next two days questioning why Harris did not wait longer to execute what could be the most consequential trade he will ever make.Andy McCullough helps you process the Skubal tradeAndy McCullough“There was a bidding war,” Harris said. “There were a lot of organizations involved. There wasn’t any need to stretch it any further. The organizations that were involved were extremely aggressive. They put in what I believed to be their max offers. Then they added to those offers also and got to a point of almost audible pain when they actually produced their best offers. They gave them to us, and we pulled the trigger.“Respectfully, the notion that we should have waited 24 or 48 hours later and extracted more value, that’s garbage. That’s not how these negotiations work.”Although rivals have suggested the Tigers focused most of their efforts on the Dodgers’ farm system, Harris presented a more complicated view featuring tempting offers from multiple clubs.“It was really tough, and it wasn’t unanimous,” Harris said.Two days later, the deadline dust settled with only one more trade.The Tigers sent right-hander Casey Mize and infielder Gage Workman to the San Diego Padres at the buzzer in exchange for left-handed pitchers Kash Mayfield and Jackson Wolf.Although just outside the top 100 overall, Mayfield was the Padres’ No. 2 prospect, a 6-foot-4 arm with fluid mechanics and a plus changeup. Along with Ryan and Smith, he helps replenish a Tigers system that has started to see its supply of high-end pitching run dry.That in itself is one of the reasons the Tigers entered the days leading up to the deadline facing a challenging crux. With Skubal and so many other players injured, their May was abysmal, the type of nightmare month that can tank an entire season.But since June 1, the Tigers have a 32-20 record. Their plus-63 run differential overall is the second best in the American League. The Tigers have still been haunted by bouts of bad luck and maddening failures to close out games. Their bullpen performance in high-leverage situations ranks 29th out of 30 teams.Still, the Tigers drew back to within striking distance in a weak American League. They swept the Athletics over the weekend, even with Skubal gone after the first game and uncertainty lingering during the next two.The situation — buy, sell or both — left Harris crunching the numbers and testing his gut.“I hate selling with every fiber in my body,” Harris said. “I absolutely hate it.”Throughout July, Harris kept asking himself two questions: Had he done enough to put the Tigers in a position to add to this team?Had he done enough to justify passing up future returns for the hope of winning in 2026?“Once I came to peace with the answer to those questions being no, I thought it was in the best interest of this organization to make the trades that we made this week,” Harris said.Tarik Skubal discusses his trade to the DodgersFabian ArdayaNow Skubal and Mize are gone. But other players on expiring contracts, such as Gleyber Torres, Kenley Jansen and an injured Jack Flaherty, remain. Harris indicated the markets for those players were not good enough to warrant removing them from the current team.Harris also talked of still believing in his roster, one that is suddenly turning over to more players drafted or developed in the past four years under his watch. Rookie Kevin McGonigle is already one of the best players in the AL. Rookie Max Clark, Harris’ first draft pick, was promoted this weekend. Hao-Yu Lee, a Harris trade acquisition for Michael Lorenzen at the 2023 deadline, has helped inject life and vigor into the lineup.“I’m really proud of these players for digging out of this hole,” Harris said. “I think it speaks to the character of these players and how they just don’t give up.”Still, trading Skubal and Mize leaves a void in the rotation for the immediate future. More pressing, the Tigers did not add help for their leaky bullpen.“When looking at the prices and the quality of the relievers that were available to us at the deadline and the overall context of our situation, it just didn’t make sense,” Harris said.So much has happened since the cold months of the offseason, when Harris was first assembling this roster and seemingly made the choice to push for a ring in Skubal’s final season.“We had opportunities to trade him this winter, and we chose not to because we tried to win the World Series here,” Harris said.Now the Skubal saga has reached its end. The aptly named Hope, plus Ryan and Smith, will become among the most important players in the organization.It’s a deal we will be talking about for years to come.“I think the ultimate blame on this, it lies with me,” Harris said. “I should have built more depth. I should’ve found ways to keep players healthier. I should have found ways to find more buckets to clear more water in May so that we didn’t have a 6-22 month. … I promise you I have lost a lot of sleep thinking about it and coming up with concrete takeaways that I can use moving forward and make sure that this season doesn’t happen again.”