Tigers looking for bargains at Winter Meetings

DETROIT -- The last time baseball held its Winter Meetings in Las Vegas a decade ago the Tigers played with smaller moves, coming off a last-place finish in the American League Central with a bloated payroll. Their trades for starter Edwin Jackson and catcher Gerald Laird, and their signing of shortstop Adam Everett didn't make headlines at the event, but they set the stage for Detroit to vault back to respectability in 2009, coming within an extra-inning tiebreaker of an AL Central title. A year later, Jackson went into the Max Scherzer trade, and the rest is history.

This time around, the Tigers return to Vegas with much humbler goals and a vastly younger roster, but their mindset is the…