Morosi: "50-50" chance Tigers trade Skubal, with Torkelson another name to watch

Will the Tigers trade Tarik Skubal ahead of the trade deadline? Their decision could come down to the 6 p.m. wire Tuesday night.

"Scott Harris knows that he’s got a piece that everybody in the industry would love to have and he knows that Baltimore has the best pieces of anybody to get him," MLB insider Jon Morosi said Monday on 97.1 The Ticket. (Listen in audio player above.) "And as a result, he probably feels like it’s his job to hold out until the last possible minute."

Morosi estimates a Skubal trade has a 50-50 chance of happening, with the Orioles almost certainly on the other end of it. Baltimore has three of the top-15 prospects in baseball per MLB Pipeline in shortstop Jackson Holliday, third baseman Coby Mayo and catcher Samuel Basallo, all of whom could fill long-term needs for the Tigers.

"I think it’s a coin flip, I really do," Morosi said. "And there are a few reasons why. Number one, the Orioles under new ownership have enough prospects to get this deal done. The Orioles have not just the best farm system in the game, but the best young major leaguers in the game in terms of guys who are 25, 24 and younger, and not all of them can play every day."

"Mike Elias, their GM, has done a magnificent job over a long period of time to accumulate all of this talent. And now it feels like, from Baltimore’s standpoint, it’s time to go for it."

From the Tigers' standpoint, Morosi says that if they wanted it known that Skubal "is going nowhere, no way, no how, they would have said that by now. They would have said, we’re not trading him under any circumstances."

"It’s a fascinating time to see which way it goes," he said. "I’m not going to say that it’s likely, because I think it’s really close to a toss-up. It is 50-50 that it would happen. And you have a very motivated team in Baltimore that clearly still wants to get an ace pitcher."

If it does happen, the Orioles could be sending "as many as four, potentially five" prospects/players back to Detroit. And if one of them is an infield bat, Morosi says it could potentially spell the end of Spencer Torkelson's time with the Tigers: "Are they in a place where, if he is someone who is valued more highly by other teams than he is internally, would you contemplate that decision (to trade him)?"

The former first overall pick was sent down to Triple-A Toledo in early June and hasn't hit well enough to get recalled.

"They’ve had multiple chances to call him up in the last several weeks, and they haven’t done it," Morosi said. "I’m not saying they’re shopping him, but it would not surprise me at all if he is somewhere else by tomorrow night because there are probably other teams that look at what he was coming out of the draft and say, 'There’s a better hitter in there than the Tigers have been able to find.'

"I’m not saying whose fault it’s been, but that is a classic change of scenery conversation where it would not surprise me at all if a team is calling to try to get him away because this is about the floor of what you could ever expect him to be, and it can only go up from here."