Bad has turned to worse for the Detroit Tigers as they lost a significant trade piece to Tommy John surgery this week, ending his season.
The Detroit Tigers 2023 season has been a complete nightmare. They are far from contending, but any Tigers fan could have told you that before the season. They are at the point in their rebuild where they need to completely blow their roster up and bolster their farm system, following the lead of the Orioles and Reds.
According to MLB Pipeline, the Tigers only have two top 100 prospects, Jace Jung and Colt Kieth. This complete revitalization of their farm system would start with trading some of their top players.
They have a few players that could find themselves being traded, hopefully to return a few top-100 prospects. But out of their top three trade candidates, Matthew Boyd, Michael Lorenzen, and Eduardo Rodriguez, two of them aren't on the active roster due to injuries, with one of those being a season-ending injury.
Tigers announce LHP Matthew Boyd will undergo Tommy John surgery
The unfortunate party to have suffered the season-ending injury was the left-handed pitcher Matthew Boyd. Obviously, this is a heartbreaking injury and surgery for Boyd to suffer and battle through. But with the current state of medicine in baseball, Boyd should recover fine and get back to his true self in the next year and a half.
But the news is also crushing for the Tigers. After all, baseball is a business at the end of the day. And Boyd was going to be one of their bigger trade chips at the deadline, as he was likely to draw a bit of value due to his experience and the willingness of many teams to overpay for starting pitchers on the trade market (ex. Tyler Mahle to the Twins in 2022).
The Boyd injury just makes a bad season worse for the Tigers fans, front office and even their players as losing Boyd will just make them even worse. Detroit needs to go all in on the rebuild, trading as many of its pieces as possible in order to boost its farm system. A potential Matthew Boyd trade will have to wait until at least late 2024.