They were big-league baseball's most bashed and bruised team in 2019. But at least the Tigers stood to get dual breaks in 2020.
They would be picking first in each round of June's draft, which before COVID-19 showed up as a world scourge promised pick-of-the-litter status for 40 rounds.
Also, they and pretty much all their 29 big-league brethren agreed that the 2020 crop was deeper than any draft had offered in a decade.
The draft, of course, is the primary way bad pro sports teams get better. It is how future contenders are assembled. Take your lashes during a rebuild, as the Tigers did a year ago (47-114 record), then use those first-chair draft slots to scoop the best blue-chip bodies, reload the farm, and get busy constructing a contender.
Now it appears the Tigers will be getting double-whammied in 2020, and maybe again in 2021.
Major League Baseball and the Players Association reportedly are in accord on a five-round draft beginning on its original date, June 10.
Five rounds rather than 40. Five players, maximum, to fertilize a Tigers farm system that needed blanket applications of talented flesh.
It corresponds to what, at best, will be a restricted big-league season. National reports during the weekend suggest an 80-game schedule is being planned for a July start-up, with a second 2020 tune-up training camp set for June.
That is, if details can be finalized and, more critically, if the coronavirus contagion can be minimized to a point actual teams and rosters can function. Unless the pandemic eases in unexpected ways, there will no fans on hand and only television cameras following whatever happens in these games should they be played, which is still far from certain.
A canceled season will cost teams collective billions of dollars. A shortened season, especially with no fans in the seats, will recoup only a portion of those billions.
And with that kind of red ink drenching both leagues, teams aren't keen on spending money they aren't earning on deeper-drafted prospects they don't believe they can pay.
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