This really doesn't explain why our farm system is bad this year. Maybin and Miller are major league players now, they wouldn't factor in to any team's farm system rankings. None of the players we traded for Cabrera really would. Same goes for Jair Jurrjens and Gorkys Hernandez, who we traded in that awful deal for Renteria.
The Tigers actually haven't made any significant trades that involve trading prospects for big names. They've actually done the opposite. They traded Edwin Jackson, coming off a great season, for Max Scherzer and Daniel Schlereth, a deal which looks like a big winner for us. We also included Granderson in that deal and got Austin Jackson for him, who likes like a pretty good player as well.
The real problem is our major league depth is not good, so we are forced to keep bringing up our minor leaguers before they are fully ready. The amount of injuries we have due to signing so many older players also forces this issue a bit. Scott Sizemore got burn last year despite clearly not being ready for the majors, Rick Porcello started an entire season when he was 20 years old. Scherzer, Schlereth, and Jackson were all expected to be contributors last season as well. And now there is talk that Jacob Turner might be brought into the bigs this summer too.
So you could say our strong desire to win now is causing us to burn through the farm system. Could be a good thing if all those players, Jackson, Porcello, Scherzer, Turner etc, pan out as expected. They could all hit their prime at the same time and if nothing else, we'd have a killer rotation. But we'll have to see if that works out or not...