Shelton

Doesn’t really matter, but I think they switched to file and trial late in Avila’s tenure. Of course, because no one wants to go to “trial,” we never actually got to the point of “filing” with anyone until Mize last year. I think it’s a good system, personally.

As you said, you’d have to know what the internal/external alternatives were, as well as the cost of the external alternatives. No one knows this except Scott Harris and his team. But the comment about hurting the team implies that he took the current team and then made a move that reduced its effectiveness relative to what it was before the move. So, comments regarding whether he hurt the team or not, to me, can only be relative to existing team, not to hypothetical other moves that maybe could have been made instead that would have been better at similar or nominally higher cost. So, as for the internal options, that’s also hard to identify. And the knock-on effects of using those internal options in place of those two guys (ignoring finnegan) is also hard to identify. The easiest argument for the “hurt the team by the moves” position is that Montero and melton would have been better used in those slots. However, I don’t think melton was an option. Maybe that’s deserving of criticism but I think he had an innings cap and they needed to stretch that. But ignoring that, and just saying use melton, then you’ve got to replace melton innings with whatever worst bullpen/aaa arm wasn’t used. Same with Montero. And it’s not like melton and Montero would have been locks to perform better. To me, it’s a toss up. I can’t prove it either way, but neither can anyone else. In my opinion it is not as simple as pointing to poor performance by two specific guys and declaring that it hurt the team. To be clear, I am not disputing that these two guys performed poorly over the course of their short tigers tenure. There are a lot of other players you can point to that also failed during that period. But the tigers needed innings to get to the end of the season. I don’t think they had them in reserve. They didn’t need much more than that. Indeed, it turns out that all they needed was a tranch of fairly bad innings! Finally, both Paddack and Morton ultimately pitched worse for the tigers than they had for their prior team. I don’t think anyone really expects to get a substantially different performance over the final two months relative to the prior four months. Even then, Morton started off pretty strong for the tigers, following a couple strong months for the orioles. From June through August he threw 80 innings with a low 4 era. There was little evidence as we entered September that Scott Harris’s decision to add Morton a month earlier had made the team worse, especially given that we needed dem innings. Similarly, Chris paddack was a 1 war pitcher for the twins at the time of the trade. Nothing amazing, but an easy 4/5 starter. He gave us 30 innings in his first 6 starts, gave up too many homers in a couple starts, but we did go 4-2 in those games. So, that’s why I take issue with the idea that Scott Harris made moves that hurt the team. I think it misses the point of those moves, and relies too heavily on hindsight and vibes due to the September collapse by almost everyone wearing the uniform. This was a long explanation to your question. I regret the length. Short answer is that I don’t think it’s a given that the internal options would have been better and that we would have finished with more wins had we not made the trades.

Good point, please go back and edit your posts to say that Harris made the team better in August and worse in September and did just enough to reach the playoffs for the second year running. We wouldn’t want to leave anything out.

See, that’s the rub, and I don’t disagree. However, it’s easy to say he should have just “made a better move.” Could have acquired a better pitcher than Paddack or Morton? Surely. But at what cost? And even if we had (at some unknown cost), to what benefit? Would it have been enough to have clinched a bye? I’m not so sure. Would we have made it to the ALCS or WS? Also hard to say, but probably not. Maybe Skubal should have performed “better” in his game 2 and game 5 ALDS starts. I think one problem we likely ran into is that to get a “better” pitcher in that trade market, Harris probably would have had to move Kevin, Max C, Bryce, Josue, or Melton. I know folks want to keep creating deals involving max anderson and hao-yu Lee, but you can’t make other teams like your mid-tier prospects more than another team’s mid-tier prospects. There is a long list of hypothetical moves ai think Harris should have made, but I’m not so sure that’s a list with any basis in reality. I’m glad he didn’t trade any of the big 5 to add a 1-2% increase in reaching a particular round of the postseason.

What about Finnegan? Logic also dictates that you have to consider who else would have had to have been in their position in those starts, and who would have had to backfill if they weren’t there. The point is that just because the team performed worse doesn’t mean he made the team worse, which is a point being made repeatedly in here. With the buffer they had, merely limiting the damage is still a positive relative to the baseline. Let’s not forget that they also struggled on each side of the all-star break, so it’s not like they had some well-oiled machine that he threw a wrench into by adding Charlie Morton.

I think you are selling him a bit short here. He did that, sure. He also took over an organization full of “Avila guys” that was pretty terrible. Meadows and Dingler were close to non-prospects. But your point is very good. Taking Avila’s chicken **** and making chicken salad is not just something that happens. But, beyond that, he added Vierling and McKinstry and Holton, each of whom played a big role in the 2024 success. Trey Sweeney was very good over his six week stint in 2024 and was a big reason they made the comeback they did, and we don’t have him if Scotty hadn’t signed Jack and flipped him.

Seems like if his moves at a certain point in time caused the team to become worse, they would have become worse at that point in time. Maybe his moves kept them from being 12-16 in August instead. Maybe not every high variance set of results needs to have a distinct cause assigned.

Scott Harris’s deadline moves were so bad last year that he caused them to lose 12 games in August. They won 16 games in August just to spite him.

Baseball feels uniquely situated to rarely provide satisfaction to a certain subset of fans. If you win 90 games, that’s basically going 9-7 over every 16 game stretch if you tried to flatten it out. Talk radio will call that basically .500. Never getting into a rhythm. If you get off to a quick start and get 18 games above .500 after two months, then play .500, talk radio will complain about being a .500 team since June 1. Why didn’t they do more at the deadline? Start off slow and then come back? They won in spite of management. Imagine how they good they could have been if they hadn’t thrown away the first two months.

Yep. Call it what you want, but it is what it is.

Relative to the current 12-team system that includes conference championship games, a 24-team system without auto bids or conference championship games feels like an improvement. I would assume 8 byes and 16 teams playing in the first round at campus sites during the first week of December in place of conference championship games. A 9-24 matchup is likely to be more interesting than the current 5-12 (who is a true 20ish ranked team). A second set of campus site games in the round of 16, giving the top 8 seeds all a home game and a true 1-16 matchup feels ok. The toothpaste is out of the tube with the current system. Eliminating auto bids (which won’t eliminate the good group of five teams), and replacing meaningless conference championship games in the first week of December doesn’t seem so bad.

A few notes: Skubal as a 5+ service time service player is not unique. Nearly every player to reach their final year of arbitration is a 5+ service time player. This is not some secret provision that makes him special. Why is it a story? Because Boras told his media cronies and they ate it up. The reason it’s rarely cited is that it has minimal persuasive value. Slubal is in his third year of arbitration. Not his fourth. That David price contract was a fourth year arbitration award. In Price’s third year he made 14. He went 4-10-14-19.7 over his four arb years. Juan soto’s record of 31 was also a fourth year arbitration contract. Soto went 8-17-23-31. Corbin Burnes was a three year arb guy. Had won a Cy young. Was coming off multiple star appearances. Received cy young votes multiple years in a row. His three arb salaries were 6-10-15. Now he’s getting 31 from free agency. The suggestion from Skubal/boras is that his arbitration salaries should be 4-10-32. A 22 million dollar raise. A 200+% raise. Skubal is a fantastic pitcher Second best in baseball at the moment. But he’s not a unicorn. He’s not the first tier 1 SP or ace or whatever label you want to use. He’s not the first player coming off a cy young. There was one just last year named Tarik Skubal that got over a 100% raise from his prior 4 million dollar salary. For Skubal and Boras to prevail, they would need to convince an objective and trained neutral arbitration panel that Skubal is so unique that his fair series of arbitration salaries would be at least 4-10-26. Is there a chance? The panel is human so anything is possible. But they are also huge nerds and they are going to love Scotty Harris.

My belief is that Skubal and boras are operating outside of any reasonable bounds here, and they are doing it precisely to push their narrative and make it into a story. I think it’s a calculated risk that they believe will pay off down the line. We all know boras is very skilled at this type of thing. But I don’t think it’s necessarily going to work before a three person panel of arbitrators from the AAA (American Arbitration Association).

For someone not motivated to change people’s minds on this topic, you sure are spending a lot of words trying to change people’s minds, Chas!

Yeah, I think passan got a bit out over his skis when he focused on that wrinkle. It’s true for almost every final year arb guy after all.

Yeah, I don’t think the ability to use non-arb comps in the party’s remarks has as much of an effect as it would seem. It’s still a fact that Cole’s contract was a FA contract and Skenes is pre-arb. The ability to mention these non-arb deals doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be given substantial weight. It might move the needle slightly one way or the other, but the Skenes comp (or hunter brown for that matter, or any number of pre-FA cy young winners) are just as relevant. There is a lot of evidence out there, and I think the majority of it is going to point to a value below the 25.5MM midpoint needed for a tigers win.

It’s a fascinating case and I love it. What I don’t love is that the narrative machine is already humming. Tony Paul last night was like “the tigers think that Skubal is worth only 4 million more than Cobb.” I really like how we will have the Cobb contract to reference for years to come.

Doesn’t matter. It’s the value that they use in the comp.

I think this was a very aggressive and strategic number by the tigers, knowing that boras and Skubal would almost surely submit 32 to beat the Soto number. It might work.

I’m sure it been said before but that’s not how it works. Their job is to pick the salary that is closest to the “true” arbitration value. So if they look at all the comps, such as Price (pitcher; a decade ago) and Soto (position player; highest arb contract), etc, and they say Tarik should get 25 (a huge raise from his last salary and the highest ever for a pitcher), then they must choose the tigers 19 million contract (6 million difference) over skubal’s 32 million contract (7 million difference).

Or, they had a highly improbably series of results occur, and Harris’s moves actually helped them avoid the missing the playoffs entirely. See, there are facts, and then there hypotheticals that cannot be proven. The facts are that Harris made certain moves, the tigers finished with a certain number wins, and they finished behind Cleveland and ahead of Houston. The effect of moves made and not made is impossible to say, by you, me, or anyone else. It’s also a fact that the front office has more information than fans. That’s not really up for debate. That doesn’t mean that the front office can predict the future. I recall quite a few folks not being happy with the acquisition of Paddack, but I can’t say I remember anyone saying it was going to cost them their division lead.

It’s a fine line between defending a move and supporting a move. But regardless, I think it’s important to be careful with hindsight, and it’s also important to avoid complaining about hypothetical deals that were not made. Anyway, I doubt there were May people that necessarily supported the move for Cobb, Paddack, or Morton. However, none of these moves cost them much of anything. In that regard, I think you can defend them. It’s easy to point to Cobb and the 15 million, but more than anything this illustrates to me that there isn’t a hard budget or cost cap imposed by ownership. The deadline trades further illustrate this, in view of all of the dead money taken on in these deals. With specific reference to Cobb now, this was an early signing that was clearly made to bring in a guy to compete for a 5th SP spot and provide some bulk inning beyond that. Jack Flaherty was not yet signed and was unlikely to be signed. Had Jack been under contract, I doubt Cobb or another guy like him would have been signed. This was a minor deal and they didn’t allow it to stop them from adding Flaherty. This is the defense of this move, while not necessarily supporting it. Paddack and Morton are different. I think they were mostly interested in just making it to the end of the season and they needed innings. Neither were going to pitch in the playoffs. The cost was nothing. The alternatives would not have been better. There were better pitchers available of course, but without knowing what the demand was, it’s very difficult to say with any certainty whether another deal would have been preferable. That said, I do think they expected more from paddack. I don’t think they expected more than a #5 starter, but they probably hoped he would be able to stick in the rotation. Morton was simply added to eat up some innings. So, it’s fair to say the Paddack deal was a mistake. But I also think it is defensible.

Yes, lunatics.

Seems like most folks feel the team could do even just a little bit better if only the manager or GM used this one neat trick. I wish it were possible to truly get a feel for how tigers fans feel relative to fans of other teams. Because to me, it sure seems like the vast majority of tigers fans are ****ing lunatics. And I don’t feel like it’s just a matter of proximity bias, because I don’t get the same sense from Lions fans, M fans, or Wings fans. The Pistons only have 13 fans, but for the most part seem pretty chill.

I wonder what else Benetti would do under this potential NBC deal. Would he end up in a Tirico-light gig, working the Sunday night games and occasional other NBC-related broadcasts? They have NBA now. I assume this would mean the end of his NFL and college football duties that he did for Fox. Seems like the NBC stuff might fit better and have less overlap than what he currently has via FOX.