Andrew Buller-Russ
With just days to go before the Aug. 1 MLB trade deadline, baseball trade rumors are heating up like never before. It’s not just Shohei Ohtani who’s drawing all the attention, the Detroit Tigers have also taken several trade calls too.
Like many other teams making decisions ahead of the deadline, the Tigers, sitting far behind first place in the AL Central, are likely to become sellers. But this is still a young team with an eye on competing in the near future, which means, many of their top players may not be available either.
Yet, that hasn’t prevented some teams from calling about 25-year-old outfielder Kerry Carpenter, who’s come on really strongly as of late. According to Jon Morosi of MLB Network, “trade interest in Carpenter is robust‘.
But as Morosi adds, Detroit envisions Carpenter as being a key contributor to their team both now and in the future. In other words, the player who’s still arbitration eligible through 2026 may not be available in trade discussions. At least not this summer.
After starting the year in Triple-A, Carpenter has since played 55 games with the big-league club, hitting .260 with 11 home runs and 29 RBI across 199 plate appearances entering play on Sunday. It’s clear the Tigers plan on giving their young slugger as many opportunities as he can handle the rest of the way, even if teams would like to see how he’d fit into their lineup too.
If anything, this is just a sign of the Tigers’ player development paying off, as Carpenter was once a 19th-round pick out of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University back in 2019. Now, he’s a hot commodity on the MLB trade market.
