Tigers 'will be fine' without Bregman, turn to internal 3B options

LAKELAND, Fla. -- While Tigers pitchers and catchers get in their official Spring Training workouts and throwing sessions this week, the many Detroit position players who have reported early take batting practice on the back fields. It’s a fun time, evidenced by the hollering that teammates do when one of them sends a home run over the fences and bouncing onto the street beyond the Tigertown complex.

Scott Harris does not take batting practice; he’s an executive, after all. But when the Tigers’ president of baseball operations received the obligatory question on the Alex Bregman saga to begin his first Spring Training media session, he approached it like a batting-practice fastball over the plate.

“Was I disappointed [to not sign Bregman]? I wouldn’t characterize my emotions that way,” Harris said Friday morning. “I would say we want players who want to be here.”

The last part is the same phrase Harris used last week when talking about Jack Flaherty signing back with the Tigers as a free agent.

“I say that a lot,” Harris continued, “because I mean it. We want players who want to be Tigers. We made a very compelling offer to Alex Bregman, but he chose to sign somewhere else. That’s fine. We knew that was a possibility throughout this process, and we planned for that outcome. We’re fortunate to be in this spot where we have an owner in Chris [Ilitch] who gives us the flexibility to pursue elite free agents. We’re going to land those guys sometimes, like we did with Jack Flaherty. Sometimes we’re not, and that’s fine.”

Without Bregman, Harris confirmed, the Tigers will look internally to fill third base.

“Heading into this entire process, we knew that given all the work that we had done on the acquisition and development front, we were going to be able to run out a really good team with or without Alex Bregman,” Harris said. “We have Jace Jung, who mashed his way through the Minor Leagues, a left-handed hitter who deserves a lot of reps at this level. We have Matt Vierling, who is a versatile and athletic right-handed bat who put up a sneaky good year. And we have Andy Ibá?ez, who’s a lefty killer who plays really good defense at third base. Those guys are going to help us win a lot of games this year. We also have a lot of young talent coming real fast through the farm system, and a lot of them play on the left side of the infield.”

Then came the exclamation point from Harris.

“We’re going to be just fine without Alex Bregman,” he continued. “And we still have a clubhouse that just got to the postseason and just beat a team with Alex Bregman, so it clearly can be done. We’ve just got to focus on the guys we have in camp right now and we’ve got to get after it in spring, because we’ve got to get a lot better to be able to compete in this division.”

Harris was referring to last year’s AL Wild Card Series, in which the Tigers beat the Astros with Bregman in what ended up being his final games in Houston.

The Tigers focused their offseason on Bregman, Harris said, because he was the best fit on the market to add a right-handed bat to their roster. With Bregman heading to Boston on a reported three-year, $120 million deal, turning down Detroit’s reported six-year, $171.5 million offer, the Tigers will stick with their big-picture them of giving opportunities to their young talent, starting with former Top 100 prospect Jung.

“I think the broader theme here,” Harris said, “is we can’t be an organization that is dependent upon signing a specific free agent. We don’t want to be the organization that’s desperate to sign a specific free agent, or that hinges our current plans or our future on a specific free agent. We have to be dependent on the young talent we’re acquiring and developing, and that’s all against the backdrop of one of the best farm systems in baseball and one of the better emerging young cores in baseball. So we’ve got to continue to give those young guys opportunities.”

Not surprisingly, then, Harris disagreed with the narrative that emerged during the Bregman chase that the Tigers have a two-year window of contention to maximize while AL Cy Young award winner Tarik Skubal remains under team control.

“We don’t see it that way,” Harris said. “We see an organization that has come a really long way in two years, that is on the brink of becoming one of those organizations that is a fixture in October. We haven’t earned that yet. We can’t talk like that. We have to continue to get better in the spring and into the season. But there are a lot of guys in that clubhouse who are going to be here for a long time, and there are a lot of guys in the [minor league] clubhouse down the road who are going to be in this clubhouse for a long time. So we feel really good about our present and our future.”