Detroit Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris believes the organization got the best deal it could for Tarik Skubal.
"There wasn't any need to stretch it any further," Harris said Monday, according to ESPN's Alden Gonzalez. "The organizations that were involved were extremely aggressive, and they put in what I believe to be their max offers. And then they added to those offers also and got to the point of almost audible pain when they actually produced their best bold offers, and they gave it to us and we pulled the trigger. The notion that we should've waited 24 or 48 hours later and extracted more value - that's garbage. That's not how these negotiations work."
Detroit traded the two-time Cy Young winner to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Saturday, two days before the trade deadline. Zyhir Hope, the best player of the three acquired by the Tigers in exchange for Skubal, wasn't considered the top prospect in the Dodgers' system at the time of the trade.
Harris praised the players whom the Tigers got in return and said his front-office staff approached the deadline knowing what it would take to deal Skubal, who's a pending free agent.
"We came into this very well prepared," Harris said. "We came into this with a firm idea of the type of deal that we wanted to ultimately land. And we had a deep understanding of what every organization had to offer."
Skubal is expected to make his Dodgers debut Tuesday against the Chicago Cubs. He'll likely command the largest free-agency deal ever for a pitcher this coming offseason.
