Despite The Rough Weekend, The Detroit Tigers Would Still Be Stupid To Trade Jonathan Schoop

It was a terrible weekend for the Detroit Tigers. After the most successful home stand in 5 years in which they won 7 games in a row, they faltered and got swept out of Kauffman Stadium by the lowly Royals. The trade deadline is 4 days away. The Detroit Tigers, as expected, will not be buyers, nor should they be. This team is not going anywhere in 2021. They will not win the division, they will not make the playoffs. With all of that said, I am adamantly against trading Jonathan Schoop and I will tell you why.

Reason #1 is very simple. The trade market has shown over the last several years that the return you get for half a season of a solid major-league hitter is minimal at best. Since 2017 the Detroit Tigers have traded the following players at the deadline- Alex Avila, JD Martinez, Leonys Martín, Justin Upton (traded at the waiver deadline in 2017), and Nick Castellanos. The best player that they got back for all of those players (so far) was Willi Castro, who was recently called back up after being demoted to AAA. As of the time of this blog, he has a .637 OPS on the season with 74 strikeouts and 18 walks. That’s the best player they’ve gotten back. To trade Jonathan Schoop and expect a good return at this point would be the definition of insanity for the Tigers. That is not meant to be a knock on Schoop because I think he's a good, solid ballplayer. It is simply a statement about the current status of the trade market. 

Reason #2 is that it is too late in the rebuild to trade guys just so you can trade them. I just said that they wouldn’t get anything back, so the only reason you trade him is so you can give us Isaac Paredes reps at second base. I think in the long run, Isaac Paredes will probably be a pretty solid baseball player, but in the 48 games that he’s played at the major-league level so far, he has a .621 OPS with 2 home runs and a .297 on base percentage. He’s only 22 years old. Do I think he still might end up being good? Absolutely! But it is year 5 of this rebuild I’m tired of banking on guys who might be good. If Paredes was some sort of sure fire, can’t miss, automatic prospect like Spencer Torkelson, I would understand, but that’s not the case.

Reason #3 why I’m so adamantly against trading Jonathan Schoop is because it would be so very easy to re-sign or simply extend him before the season ends. I know there’s probably a lot of people reading this blog right now saying “If you don’t trade him, you’re going to end up losing him anyway, so what’s the point?" You don’t have to do that anymore. The fact is the Tigers could sign 10 Jonathan Schoops and still stay under the luxury tax. Eventually Chris Ilitch needs to be willing to accept the fact that his hands are going to have to get a little bit dirty if this thing wants to get off the ground. Jonathan Schoop is a good player on a team that has been void of good players for the last several seasons. He has a .753 career OPS and has the most home runs of any second baseman in baseball since 2014. He’s a good clubhouse guy and he’s only 29 years old. That’s a guy that you keep. Now obviously if he asks for 5 years, 200 million don’t give it to him, but I don’t see that happening. You could offer him a nice 3-year, $30-$35 million extension right now and I bet he'd probably sign it. Everyone got all shook up because Schoop signed Scott Boras to be his agent, but he did that so he could finally earn a multi-year deal after 3 seasons of being given 1 year contracts. That makes sense, so give him a multi-year deal. Lock him up for several seasons, and you’ll have a veteran presence as part of your future. I know that the Tigers just got swept over the weekend, but this season has been substantially better than the seasons that preceded it. With that said, there is not currently a single position player on this roster that you can look at and say “That’s a part of the future.” Jeimer Candelario remains a possibility, Jake Rogers and Eric Haase remain possibilities. Spencer Torkelson, Riley Greene, and Dillon Dingler will probably be part of the future, but they aren’t here right now. They are still in AA where they should be. I’m so tired of the endless rebuild. I’m so tired of trading away our best players for sub .700 OPS middle infielders with no power. Keep him here, lock him up.

Now there is 1 exception that I could live with, and that is the Tigers trading Jonathan Schoop, getting most likely nothing back and then choosing to re-sign him in the off-season. In my opinion, when a player gets traded by an organization, the odds of them returning to the organization that traded him are very slim, especially when that organization is still rebuilding. I know that there are exceptions, Aroldis Chapman being the biggest one in recent memory, but 9 times out of 10, when you trade a guy, he doesn’t come back. So keep Jonathan Schoop. If you make an attempt to sign him in the off-season and he goes elsewhere, so be it. That’s the business of baseball. But unless there is some overwhelmingly amazing potential return for Jonathan Schoop (there won’t be) I’ll continue to be adamantly against the idea of trading him.