With a 50-53 mark, Detroit entered tonight’s tilt against Baltimore trailing Minnesota for the 2nd AL Wild Card by 3 1/2 games, and as you’re probably aware, the Tigers were not sufficiently impressed by said status with two months of baseball to play ; earlier this week, GM Dave Dombrowski (above) dealt David Price, Yeonis Cespedes and Joakim Soria to alleged contenders. Keeping in mind that one of those contenders, Toronto, is only two games ahead of the Tigers, Detroit’s capitulation is either cowardly or a savvy plan for the future. It seems the Detroit News’ Jerry Green would lean toward the former (“the decision to become peddlers in July is a baseball blasphemy, an embarrassment for Detroit. A surrender that trampled logic”) :

The Tigers quit while they still had a shot. They turned Pollyanna when they would have been the able to qualify again for the October playoffs. They had a better shot than the more ambitious the Blue Jays, determined to reboot on the go. Better than the White Sox, below the Tigers in ballfield quality, playing with delusions of grandeur. Better than the Orioles, better than the Mets, the Rangers, the Diamondbacks — clubs that refused to quit.

The major question, with all the cooing and delusions about the Tigers’ near future, is how a perennial contender got itself in a situation that it would outright quit in July. the Tigers allowed too much quality pitching to drift away, via free agency with Max Scherzer and trades of Doug Fister and now Price.

What the Tigers have now is a load of prospects that other clubs off-loaded in the hopes of winning now. Maybe the touted Daniel Norris will become a humongous winner in Detroit. But he is not the equal of David Price.