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By Ben Watanabe
Contributing Sports Writer
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The Detroit Tigers should be gearing up for an exciting playoff run.
They're within striking distance of first place in the AL Central and of an AL Wild Card berth, and with almost two months remaining in the season, there's plenty of time to make up ground.
Yet the team instead looks like it will limp toward a disappointing season -- although the front office apparently didn't decide that would be the case until almost the last minute.
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In an MLB trade deadline post mortem on Monday, Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris revealed the team decided to sell in earnest just five days before the deadline, according to MLive's Evan Woodbery. Last Thursday, to be exact. That was the day of pitcher Tarik Skubal's last start with the team, a loss to the Baltimore Orioles. Four days later, Skubal was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The 11th-hour pivot was all the more surprising because despite an atrocious first three months of the season, the Tigers have played playoff-caliber baseball of late. Thursday's loss was their only defeat amid a 4-1 stretch that pulled them within 2 1/2 games of a wild card spot. Their 15-9 record in July wasn't Boston Red Sox-esque, but it was darn good.
Despite how things looked on paper, however, the reality was too dire to ignore. Skubal is a free agent at the end of the season and wasn't expected to re-sign with Detroit. And while the Tigers weren't far back in the win-loss column, the fact that they needed to leapfrog three teams in the division standings and five teams for the wild card made the prospect of a comeback too daunting.
Just last fall, the Tigers were one win away from the AL Championship Series and harbored high hopes of going farther this year with the best pitcher in baseball. Instead, it will be an empty summer in Motown, and it happened just like that.
More MLB: Grading Trade Deadline: MLB's Biggest Winners, Losers
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