Al Avila and Chris Ilitch Have Failed
The Detroit Tigers need to clean out the front office from top to bottom
It was a warm Thursday evening in mid-June. In most of southeast Michigan, kids are out of school. The temperature was in the low 90s in the daytime but as the sun went down below Comerica Park, the temperature would be near perfect for a baseball game. No threat of rain, and though perhaps not the most ideal of nights for baseball, taking place during the workweek, this is the sort of game that should draw a good amount of fans. Instead, the attendance totaled 17,448, or 42% of Comerica Park. On television, it looked even more sparse. Those who did show up watched the listless Tigers lose 3-1 to the middling Texas Rangers.
In 2012, ten years earlier on a nearly identical date (June 20), middle of the week (Wednesday) and in the evening on a hot summer night, the Detroit Tigers faced the St. Louis Cardinals. That night, they drew 38,871 fans. The next day, on a Thursday afternoon in scalding mid-90s temperatures, the team drew 40,776 fans, who witnessed a walk-off single to win the game for the Tigers. Ten years later, they drew 17,448 fans. In year six of a rebuild, the team is 24-40.
I was at that Thursday afternoon game against St. Louis back in 2012. I remember the sweltering heat and the searing pain you felt if any part of your skin touched the Comerica Park seats without clothing in between. I remember Jacob Turner boosting his trade value and wobbling through a start, and I remember Quinton Berry’s walk-off hit to win it and the view I had from my first-base line seats. Most of all, I remember the deep devotion and love I felt for my baseball team, and the hope that we were on the cusp of something great. That fall, they’d win the pennant, the peak of what would be a stirring four-year run with some truly exceptional players.
Ten years later, I was not at Comerica Park. And instead of hope and love, all I have is a completely broken feeling. Disillusioned at a failed rebuild that seemed failed three years ago, and was allowed three more years to fail even harder. A joke of a team assembled by an incompetent GM overseeing a management group that has failed to develop amateur talent for two decades, and being run at the top by the grifter heir to the five minute pizza empire.
It’s a story of unrequited love. The Detroit metro area and the state of Michigan is a phenomenal baseball market. The state of Michigan loves its baseball team. Unfortunately, under the torturous tenure of Al Avila and Chris Ilitch, we have been reminded time and time again, that they do not love us back. And that’s what hurts.
[Craig Lassig/AP]
How bad the 2022 Tigers are
Before we delve into the chronic problems plaguing this management group, I want to first discuss the horrific product on the field right now. The Tigers’ 24-40 record is terrible, yet it somehow doesn’t fairly represent how bad the offense has been. You can google “Detroit Tigers offense” and see a multitude of stories about how the 2022 Tigers offense is quite possibly the worst offense in the MLB since World War II. They are either dead last or close to the bottom in nearly every offensive category. Among hitters with at least 120 PAs, 6 of the 38 worst in wRC+ are Tigers hitters. Of the 57 position players with the worst fWAR, *eight* are Detroit Tigers (!!!).
In the past eight games, the Tigers have scored 11 runs. As a team, they are averaging 2.64 runs per game. The winner of the ERA title in a given season typically has an ERA around 2.64… which means that the 2022 Tigers offense is making the average pitcher they face into a Cy Young caliber pitcher. They have been shut out 10 times in 64 games, have scored one run 11 times, and have scored two runs 11 times. Which means in total, they have scored two runs or fewer in 32 of 64 games (50%). Want to bump it up to three runs? They’ve done that 12 times, so the total of games scoring 3 runs or fewer is 44 of 64 (68.8%). It is unimaginably bleak.
Of the nine hitters who have played the most games for Detroit, *five* have batting averages below .200. Put another way, the median hitter in the most common Detroit lineup is hitting .192. Of those nine hitters, six have an OPS+ below 70 (!!!). The only two hitters that OPS+ ranks as above league average are Harold Castro and Miguel Cabrera, who are hitting at a rather high clip but have combined for seven HRs in 64 games. As a team, the Tigers have hit a shockingly terrible 31 HRs in 64 games. That’s 0.48 per game… the average team hits around one per game.
They have the MLB’s 5th highest K%, and the worst BB%. They swing at everything, make little contact, and when they do get a hit, it’s always a single. Once on base, no one steals or makes anything happen, as they are dead last in steals as a team and FanGraphs’ BsR metric, which is a catch-all for baserunning, has the Tigers worst at -10.7. Perhaps the most incredible part about this is the fact that even though none of these position players can hit at all, they amazingly can’t field either. The Tigers are 24th in defensive fWAR (-16.4). Fielding Bible’s DRS metric is a bit kinder, but even that still puts them merely middle of the pack. There is nothing that this group of position players does well.
The pitching has been a saving grace, despite the avalanche of injuries hitting the rotation. The bullpen remains near the top of the league, though recently there have been signs of the unit starting to fracture. The rotation has been salvaged due to surprising performances from the likes of Alex Faedo and Beau Brieske, but the injuries have forced players like Elvin Rodriguez into duty, who have been promptly teed off on by opposing hitters. The Tigers are 16 games under .500, yet somehow it could be dramatically worse if pitching coach Chris Fetter were not around.1
This is a terrible, unwatchable team. In a season that came with optimism and hopes of clawing back to .500 following a surprisingly positive 2021, it has been a nightmare. The high priced free agent acquisitions have not paid off- Eduardo Rodriguez struggled through eight starts, then got injured, and is now taking time off from the team. Meanwhile Javier Baez is quite possibly the MLB’s worst hitter, a stunning .526 OPS (53 OPS+) paired with his usually high strikeout rate and just *one* HR since late April. The ownership finally showed willingness to spend, and what they purchased has been a total bust, the MLB version of paying top dollar for what you thought was an autographed Ted Williams baseball card, only to find out that the signature was a fake, forged by some 57-year-old guy named Randy in Dubuque, Iowa.
The product on the field is a farce. Even when they battle in tight games, they find ways to throw it away. The Sunday afternoon defensive meltdown against the Yankees a few weeks back was a classic example of this. The crowds at Comerica Park are despicably small during what should be a very crowded period given the beautiful June weather.
And if you want to watch at home, you are treated to the single worst TV broadcasting crew in the MLB, featuring two or three 60-year-old men calling the game from a catatonic state, narrating with the same vocal inflections of a parent reading a bedtime story. The play-by-play man is calling a sport he is not well-suited to broadcast, unable to judge a fly ball off the bat, while the color commentators alternate between a guy whose vocal patterns resemble an asleep man mumbling in the night2 and a sassy boomer who won’t stop talking about how much he hates modern baseball, struggling to not say something offensive during a broadcast.
Simply put, comparing the Tigers of 2022 to the Tigers of 2012 is like comparing Elvis Presley of 1976 to Elvis Presley of 1958. Where 10 years ago the Tigers had packed crowds every night, a contending team, and an excellent television crew, the Tigers of today play in an empty haunted house, with a roster full of hitters who can’t hit their weight, and a TV crew who any sane person mutes the moment the broadcast begins. It is a deeply insulting state of affairs to a great baseball market that gave its team so much from 2006-2016 and every single Tigers fan is justified in not giving another single cent of business to this gang of clowns running the show.3
How we got here
For many, the story begins with the sell-off of 2017, when JD Martinez, Alex Avila, and Justin Verlander were shipped out, rapidly dismantling a fading contender. Miguel Cabrera and Victor Martinez stuck around, but only because they were contractually obligated to do so and no one would take their albatross deals. That is when the Tigers’ rebuild began, but for me, it’s not when the story begins.
The story begins on April 15, 2002, when Al Avila was hired by the Detroit Tigers to be assistant general manager and vice president of the team. The failed Avila rebuild is unlike that of Matt Millen and the Lions. Millen was a TV guy with no ties to the organization before he was handed the reigns. When Millen took over, you could make the case he’d be a decent GM, and certainly there was no obvious reason to think he’d fail so spectacularly.
But when Al Avila succeeded to the GM job in the summer of 2015, and then initiated a rebuild two years later, there was lots of reason at the time to believe he was not remotely fit to do this job. As Tigers Twitter analyst Mark Gorosh said at the time:
Rebuilding in baseball, like any sport, means finding young talent who will make up the new core of your franchise. It requires having someone at the helm with a talent for identifying younger players, typically in the amateur market, but sometimes you can get by with a GM who is a genius at picking out young pro players and moving assets to get them. Unfortunately, the Tigers have been chronically unable to develop amateur talent since the Dombrowski-Avila regime began two decades ago.
The genius of Trader Dave to pick out players like Max Scherzer, Miguel Cabrera, and Jhonny Peralta, and then the willingness to go and get them, built the 2006-16 Tigers teams. That, and Mike Ilitch’s wallet, of course. Dombrowski built contenders almost purely out of MLB trades and free agent signings (being handed a generational pitcher at the top of the 2004 draft didn’t hurt either), and his singular virtuosic ability to go and get guys at the MLB level papered over the horrendous Tigers farm system.
I always used to joke in the glory days that whenever Dombrowski made a trade involving prospects, it was going to be a good one, because the prospects the Tigers shipped out so rarely amounted to anything. The nasty underbelly of the heist that is trading garbage prospects for quality MLB players is that your farm system has to have a large stable of garbage prospects for that to happen consistently. The Tigers never had a shortage of those under Dombrowski-Avila.
As I comb back through the trade history of Dave Dombrowski, I struggle to find many prospects who I would’ve liked to keep. Jair Jurrjens had four seasons as a quality MLB starter but then flamed out at 26. Matt Joyce made one All-Star team and had a decent MLB career as a journeyman outfielder. Avisail Garcia has had a similar, Joyce-like career. Cameron Maybin is in that vein too, and Andrew Miller eventually became a dominant closer after years of drifting, but considering that they were projected as a star outfielder and ace-caliber starter when they were dealt for Miguel Cabrera, both were quite disappointing. Wily Adames has become a solid starting MLB SS, while Corey Knebel has had his moments as an MLB closer. Eugenio Suarez has had some good, juiced-ball fueled seasons as an MLB 3B.
But that’s really the list. For 13 years worth of trading top prospects for quality MLB players, the Tigers shipped out three 3rd/4th OF types, one starter with a few good years, two quality-ish back-end bullpen arms, and two solid infielders. No true stars and perhaps 15-20% of a future contending team. That’s… bad! Well, good for the Tigers in that they got oodles of good players in exchange for that, but bad for the teams doing business with Detroit and it didn’t speak well of this regime’s ability to develop prospects when it came time to use them for something other than trades.
Moreover, think about how little of the 2011-14 teams were homegrown. Of the nine regular position players on the 2013 Tigers, just Alex Avila behind the plate and Andy Dirks in LF were homegrown. In other words, the two weakest spots in the lineup. In the rotation, only Justin Verlander and Rick Porcello were homegrown (both first round picks). Even in the bullpen the 2011-14 era Tigers had to lean heavily on outsourced talent, from Jose Valverde to Joaquin Benoit to Octavio Dotel to Jose Veras to Joakim Soria to Phil Coke, the vast majority of the high-leverage bullpen arms were guys they got from trades or free agency.
When it came time to build a contending roster, the Tigers of the Dombrowski-Avila era were totally unable to do so from their own farm system. The only guys who were impact players that they produced on their own were top 40-50 picks, your Verlanders, Porcellos, and Castellanos types. But the later rounds of the draft? Nothing. The international market? Nothing. Most teams with that track record of failure at player development never contend for anything, but the greatness of Dave Dombrowski as a pro scout and trade demon + Ilitch’s willingness to spend allowed the Tigers to cut corners and win in spite of the amateur problem.
So what happened when the Tigers deleted Dombrowski and then put Avila in charge? The whole project collapsed. Without Dombrowski’s supernatural ability to pick out good players to sign/trade for, Avila and the pro scouting room failed masterfully at making the team better in the 2015-16 offseason when the goal was to “re-tool”. They gave out massive contracts to Justin Upton and Jordan Zimmermann, both of which proved disastrous. Upton at least gave the Tigers a decent 2016 season but 1.7 WAR/106 OPS+ is far from optimal for a $22 M outfielder. Zimmermann was bafflingly bad, giving the Tigers one good month before turning into a batting practice pitcher, finishing with a 4.87 ERA (6.84 ERA after April) and battling injuries in year one of a $100 M contract. The Zimmermann warning signs were ample at the time of the signing, with declining fastball velocity as he aged into his 30s leading many smart baseball writers to bemoan the signing. Somehow that first season was the best Zimmermann would give the Tigers, finishing with a 5.63 ERA over 99 starts.
Avila also added Mike Pelfrey on a one-year, $8 M contract, who bumbled his way to a 5.07 ERA over 22 starts. Mark Lowe was brought in as a premium bullpen acquisition on a two-year, $11 M contract, and proceeded to put up a 7.11 ERA (60 ERA+) over 54 appearances before being bought out prior to his second season with the team. The 2016 Tigers were probably not going to be a true contender no matter how the offseason went, but a better allocation of money would’ve gotten the team to the playoffs one last time. Instead, they burned $53.5 M in salary on four players who finished with a combined bWAR of 1.4. If you want to make the picture a little better, you can add in that the Tigers gave up little to take on Francisco Rodriguez’s $7.5 M contract and he produced 44 saves and a respectable ERA (1.3 bWAR), but in total that’s $61 M in salary added for 2.7 wins above replacement. In other words, one win above replacement per ~$22.6 M in new salary. Horrendous allocation of resources.
Because Avila botched the 2015-16 offseason so badly, the team was a mess in 2017 and the rebuild was forced to begin. That’s when the sell-off started and again, things were horrendously mismanaged. At the trade deadline, they gave up JD Martinez for Jose King, Sergio Alcantara, and Dawel Lugo, a trio that has combined for -1.8 bWAR in the majors. They did do well to get out of most of the Justin Upton money, off-loading him for Elvin Rodriguez and Grayson Long (neither have given the Tigers much of anything), but it was good just to get out from under that deal… a deal signed by Al Avila less than 24 months earlier. Avila’s best trade came that summer and is commendable, getting Jeimer Candelario and Isaac Paredes for Alex Avila and Justin Wilson, two players who flopped in Chicago. Paredes and Candelario at least have positive career numbers in the MLB and they got them for very little.
But the trade that encapsulates it all is the Verlander deal. The Tigers moved out a franchise icon (and his large contract) for three Top 100 prospects, Jake Rogers, Daz Cameron, and the centerpiece, Franklin Perez. Rogers flashed a small amount of promise as a catcher last season in the MLB, then got injured and is out for 2022 with Tommy John. Cameron has struggled to hit in the major leagues and at 25, it’s tough to imagine him being anything more than a defense-first fourth outfielder. Perez needs little introduction. The former crown jewel of the trade has been perpetually injured since the moment he came to Detroit, unable to throw a baseball without a hospital visit, something that is not great for a PITCHER. In nearly five years since the trade, he has thrown *29.1 innings at any level of competitive baseball*. That’s less than six innings per year!!!! In other words, what Justin Verlander does every five days.
In the offseason, they dealt Ian Kinsler for two players who never got above AA, and then dealt Leonys Martín at the 2018 deadline for Willi Castro, a career .675 OPS player in the majors with astonishingly bad defensive metrics. The next season they’d deal Castellanos and Shane Greene at the deadline for Alex Lange, Paul Richan, Travis Demeritte, and Joey Wentz. Lange is at least a quality MLB reliever, while Wentz finally made his MLB debut recently and got shelled. In other words, if you take the cumulative sum of all the moves Al Avila made to tear down the vestiges of the once-great Tigers teams of the early 2010s, he got a (maybe) backup catcher, a 4th outfielder, two mediocre infielders, and one good reliever.
Some will contend that the trade value for many of those players was not high due to age and their hefty contracts and while that may be true, quality front offices find a way to pick out undervalued prospects and turn them into players. Take the Toronto Blue Jays, who shipped out aging utility man Steve Pearce in the summer of 2018 to the Red Sox for an unheralded prospect named Santiago Espinal. Four years later, Espinal is hitting .287 and playing great defense as a starting 2B for a contending Toronto team and is among the most valuable 2Bs in the MLB by WAR. Yes, it is true that some of the pieces the Tigers were dealing were not going to return huge hauls, but neither was Steve Pearce. Somehow the Blue Jays were able to turn him into a better player than anyone the Tigers acquired in shipping out many big-name items like Verlander, JD Martinez, Castellanos, and Kinsler.
If you are of the belief that we should still cut Avila slack on the trades, then let’s look at drafting/player development. That was always going to be the crux of the rebuild. Avila has run six drafts since taking over, and the record here is little better than it was for the 14 drafts that he oversaw with Dombrowski. The 2016 Draft saw the Tigers hold just one pick in the top 114, using it on Matt Manning, a talented HS pitcher who progressed through the minors well but has struggled to break into the majors. The next year the Tigers held more picks but struck out spectacularly, picking Alex Faedo, who struggled in the minors but has looked okay in the MLB this season, in the first round and getting nothing after that. Their second rounder, Rey Rivera, was a stunning reach who was rarely able to get above the Mendoza Line in A-ball.
The next few drafts are still too recent to assess, but we have ample evidence of the Tigers’ failure to draft effectively OR sign and develop international amateur players dating back to the early 2000s when Avila arrived. Suarez, Garcia, Adames, and Jurrjens are the best international amateur players the Tigers have developed in twenty years, while the Red Sox reel in Rafael Devers, the Blue Jays reel in Vlad Guerrero Jr., the Nationals reel in Juan Soto, the Padres reel in Fernando Tatis Jr., and the Guardians reel in Jose Ramirez. The Tigers barely even try during the international signing window, and rarely ever contest for the big fish prizes.
The great baseball organizations today are those who routinely manufacture talent from whatever avenue is possible. Look at some of the division rivals like Cleveland. They never have the money to keep their stars, yet always know they can lose a star pitcher, snap their fingers, and boom, a new Shane Bieber appears. The Dodgers have been contending for the World Series for a decade and yet just keep rolling quality players out of their farm system factory. Same could be said for the Yankees or Red Sox, and the Blue Jays’ brain trust doesn’t look too shabby either. The Houston Astros were in the playoffs in 2015 and are likely to make the playoffs again this season, yet in that time, they turned over nearly the entire roster. They shrugged off the losses of stars like George Springer and Carlos Correa and simply replaced them with good young players they developed and kept winning. And of course, don’t even get me started on the Rays, who have a rotating cast of position players and relievers you’ve never heard of, yet they manage to win 85+ games every season on a paltry budget.
This isn’t a story about time. Al Avila has had seven years now. He’s been in the Tigers organization for twenty. The entire Toronto Blue Jays lineup, which is one of the best in the MLB, was drafted/signed/traded for during the time which Al Avila has been in charge in Detroit. The Jays were a better team than the Tigers when the Detroit rebuild started, aged out of their contention window, rebuilt on the fly, and have returned to contention with a new cast of young players, all in the time it took the Tigers to go from 74-87 to 77-85 last season (likely to be much worse this year).
It’s also not a matter of money. The Tigers don’t have a skimpy payroll. Their payroll currently sits middle of the pack at $138 M, yet they are considerably worse than teams like Tampa and Cleveland who have payrolls $50+ M less. Al Avila has been given lots of money to spend twice now in his tenure (2015-16 and 2021-22) and right now has swung and missed on nearly all of the moves he made in those windows.
At times during this rebuild, it has seemed like the Tigers don’t even know what sport they’re in. Their attempts to tank for high draft picks are peculiar when tanking alone DOES NOT WORK in the MLB. Sure you can get a high draft pick, but that’s one guy out of a roster of 26. Even if you pick a superstar, that guy is only starting once every five days or hitting only 3-4 times per game. You need to build rosters in baseball; you can’t just tank for a high pick and hope LeBron saves you team. That’s not how baseball works. You cannot build a good baseball team out of just first round picks. You have to be able to find talent in the later rounds, the international market, and free agency/trades to build a roster. Al Avila has shown no ability to do any of that.
The players they’ve used their first rounders on all looked promising as prospects in the minors, but this season has been a cold splash of water to the face called reality that it’s often bumpy for prospects. A lot of them bust, and some take years to transition into the MLB. If you’re getting just one good prospect per calendar year (via the first round), you’re going to get lapped by the competition. And that’s what has happened over and over again. The Tigers are on the fifth lap of 200, while the Blue Jays have already finished the race.
Like I mentioned with the Dodgers and Astros examples, the best teams don’t even need to tank to develop young players. If you are able to fish players out of the late rounds or the international market, you should be able to win *and* maintain a good farm system. Sure you’ll give some up in trades, but if your scouts are doing their jobs, you’ll have a new crop being added to the pool each year. Trading away top prospects/losing high draft picks due to winning or signing free agents only severely depletes the prospect pools of teams who aren’t very good at finding prospects. Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Toronto’s two young stars, were both drafted/signed during seasons in which the Blue Jays made the playoffs. The narrative that Chris Ilitch and Al Avila sold the fanbase that you can only get good prospects when you tank is complete and total bullshit. It was a laughable excuse to explain why Al Avila can only get good prospects from the top of the draft rather than just admitting the truth outright: that he’s a failure at his job. Every thinking Detroit baseball fan should’ve been offended by that line because it insults our intelligence.
I can’t tell you why Al Avila is terrible at scouting. Maybe it’s because for six seasons of this rebuild they employed DAVE LITTLEFIELD as the *vice president of player development*. For those who are unfamiliar, Littlefield was the GM of the Pirates from 2001-07, a period in which he drove the franchise into the ground, failed to acquire any Latin American talent, drafted cheaply, got spanked in trade after trade, and lost several key prospects in Rule 5 Draft buffoonery. His wikipedia page is a laundry list of epic failings and yet this man was allowed to be in charge of developing Detroit’s prospects during most of the rebuild. Embarrassing. The Tigers finally re-assigned him to a new role last summer, because they were too chicken to fire him.
The Tigers’ front office under Avila has been an old boys club of failed baseball executives who couldn’t get a job picking up lunch orders for a savvy team’s front office but who have been allowed to fuck up year after year with no consequences in Detroit. David Chadd got 17 years of blunders in the Tigers front office before he too was “re-assigned” with Littlefield last summer. If we imagine building a baseball team is like building a fast food chain, the Dodgers and Astros have erected McDonald’s-like empires, while the Tigers are busy trying to figure out how many buns go on a hamburger. And it all goes back to the people running the ship.
What now?
The biggest question, of course, is whether Al Avila faces any consequences. Chris Ilitch has tried to sell a narrative that the rebuild is over, and now that the team that was supposed to bring fans back to the ballpark is driving them away like a skunk, maybe that will affect his decision-making. It’s hard to predict what Ilitch will do, other than that he will think with his wallet first and only.
Over his time as the face of the Ilitch empire, a job he got when his father croaked and his siblings were unfit to do it, Chris Ilitch can be best described as a greedy scumbag. He milked a bankrupt city for public money to build his hockey team a new arena, as if his family’s $4+ B net worth was short on cash, and promised to invest in the city’s revitalization in exchange. Instead, he built a small sliver of what was promised, which was a self-serving office building to be the new HQ of Little Caesars, and then turned the rest of the promised “development” into parking lots that he could use to make a little extra cash during gamedays of the two teams he owns. The promise of The District Detroit was smashed to pieces by the lies, deceit, and greedy incompetence of Chris Ilitch. Why should we be surprised when the same factors smash to pieces the baseball team we all love?
If recent history is any guide, the only way Chris Ilitch moves is if it hits his business too hard. He doesn’t have his father’s interest in professional baseball; I would be rather surprised if he could tell you who “Juan Soto” is. After all, there were years of speculation that Chris Ilitch was trimming fat to sell the Tigers. If he does plan on keeping them, the only way to make something happen is to hit him in the only part of his body that has feeling, the side of his thigh where the pants’ pocket holds the wallet. After all, this is the same guy who thought compensating players for meals while they play for his team should be factored into “payroll” to apply to the luxury tax. Maybe Ilitch will recognize that the millions of Tigers fans in this state are fed up with the charlatans running his baseball team if his precious downtown parking lots stop taking in as much cash.
The truth is that while it may have been correct that the Tigers finances needed to get back in some kind of order after the crazy spending of the late Mike Ilitch years, which was good for business, what is unfolding now is terrible for business. Ownership kicked in a bunch of fresh cash in the offseason and now there is no attendance surge following such a move. The franchise’s image is taking a beating, hurting the value Ilitch could get if he sold, and also bleeding money. When a team is only on a $40-50 M payroll like Oakland or Cincinnati, you can claim the owner is a cheap bastard and just trying to make a buck. But I would be shocked if the Tigers turn a profit with this level of attendance/fan interest on a $138 M payroll.
So maybe we just need a couple more weeks of unwatchable baseball to make heads roll. If this season could be like the 2020 Detroit Lions’ season, where it ends with a complete and total clean-out of the front office, then it will be a success. Right now, that year is the only parallel to the 2022 Tigers in recent Detroit sports memory when it comes to bad vibes and it’s hard to have comparably bad vibes to Year #3 of Matt Patricia. Somehow they’ve done it.
Maybe instead Ilitch doesn’t fire Avila but instead decides to sell the team in the offseason and lets the new owner decide the management future. It’s possible that Ilitch never wanted the Tigers, decided to give owning them a swing and now will decide it’s not for him like he thought, and sell them off. In that scenario he could cut his losses, and put a huge new dumptruck of cash next to his Little Caesars/NFL money. I don’t think anyone would complain about these scenarios.
But change needs to happen soon. AJ Hinch could leave in the fall if this ship doesn’t turn around. This fanbase cannot take anymore of Al Avila and Chris Ilitch and they have no reason to. The Detroit Tigers have failed their fans at every turn since the summer of 2015, and Tigers fans should honestly give them what they deserve: tuning out of broadcasts and not going to games. Let the entire baseball world see the empty stadium every night and the unlistenable TV broadcast. Give Chris Ilitch no choice but to fire Al Avila, just as William Clay Ford had no choice but to fire Matt Millen in September 2008. A bad owner has to be forced to do the right thing.
Thankfully, we still have the authority to do the forcing.
Their strength in one-run games means the Pythagoreon Theorem expects a record of 19-45
I completely understand that Kirk Gibson’s issues are related to his Parkinson’s and am sympathetic, but maybe this line of work is one he is not well-suited for given his condition
If you insist on going to a Tigers game, I recommend wearing a paper bag on your head and dusting off your “FIRE MILLEN” sign, crossing out “MILLEN” and writing “AVILA”