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Avila is responsible for employing the team of scouts who gave him the advice on whom to draft, so he takes full responsibility for the advice they give him, and that goes double if he actually followed it. Yes, Jake Rogers is left from sending the Astros Justin Verlander, who could still pitch at the top of his game for anyone who could unlock it, plus $40 million. And Olson is the one trade piece Harris inherited whom he could save and get value out of.

Exactly this. So Al Avila drafted and signed some young ballplayers. You could have done that. Maybe I could have done that. Acquiring the ballplayers is, relatively speaking, the easy part. Developing them into contributing big leaguers is the hard part, and as a wise man once said, Al Avila couldn't develop film. Half of this lazy article was naming all these guys on the team who were first acquired by Avila. The list included first-rounders Tork, Mize, Manning, Faedo. These are success stories? With periodic exceptions, they've ranged from flashes of slightly above average to awful. Tony Paul also named Jackson Jobe, who has even stepped on the field during a game yet. Of all the first rounders, Riley Greene was the one nut the squirrel found, and he was a consensus pick at #5 overall everyone would have taken—as with Tork and Mize. Then there are the second rounders: Parker Meadows, who took six years to become a contributor here. Kind of a long time for a second rounder, but that's how long it took to iron out the funk in his game. Dingler took four to get his shot. That's pretty normal. But between them? Daniel Cabrera, stuck in neutral and serving as org depth, and Nick Quintana, now floundering in the Reds' system. Al's last two second-rounders, Izaac Pacheco (2021) and Peyron Graham (2022), are still dog-paddling their way through A-ball (although Graham did find his way to Erie for the last game of the season). Third-rounders? Kody Clemens (nepo pick). Andre Lipicius. Trei Cruz. Either gone, done, or out of the Top 30. In the meantime, who have been the most impactful picks for us? Tarik Skubal (9th round). Colt Keith (5th). Kerry Carpenter (19th). Will Vest (12th). Basically lotto ticket rounds, even Colt Keith, the only fifth-rounder from that draft worth a damn. How about undrafted free agent signings? Tony Paul names Jason Foley, Wenceel Perez, and Keider Montero. All from 2016. Foley started seeing trigger time in 2021 and did OK, but didn't really turn it on until last year, the first season of the Harris administration. The other two took eight years—or well clear of the Avila misdevelopment curse—to even start contributing at the big league level. But here's the main takeaway, in case you're missing it: not one of these guys was a success during the Avila years. Not one. They didn't succeed until Scott Harris came onboard and remade the entire scouting and development function. Even Riley Greene, the one success story Al Avila could have fairly claimed, didn't start revving it up until Harris came aboard. The reason any of Avila's guys are even in the organization is because Harris did a deep dive into everyone in the system, keeping those he and his team thought they could save, and getting rid of the rest. In any large group of players there will always be a few who can be saved. That's what's happening here, not Al Avila with some genius nine-year plan in which he cleverly plans to fail spectacularly for seven years then succeeds only after he's been gone for two. And don't get me started on the part about analytics. We're supposed to believe that Al Avila is basically the godfather of Tigers analytics, and Harris's contribution was merely to expand on its usage? I mean, really. Come on.

Boy, the beat media sure do miss Al Avila and his way of making their jobs so, so much easier.

The Detroit Tigers pitching staff is ...

I remember liking Bob Ufer. I was a child.

I don't mind jokes and stories in moderation. A decent joke or a concise story can really add to the experience. I like Dan on TV because he calls the game as though he's on radio. I acknowledge that a lot of people hate that very thing.

I will tell you what does annoy me about Benetti: the guy has all but told us that he is passing through Detroit by insisting on skipping dozens of games so he can do national broadcasts. Going 100% national is clearly his goal, and it's not even because he considers himself football-first so he wants to make that his #1 thing. I would respect him more if that were the case. But he also bugs out on Tigers games so he can do national baseball games on FS1. Which, honestly, I'm fine with from a Tigers' fan standpoint, because that means we get Dan Dickerson on TV, and to me, that's a win. And now that Benetti has said that he's going to skip his national football game this one time because the Tigers are, all of a sudden and unexpectedly, where the spotlight is at this very moment, I respect his blatant careerism even less. So it's not only the Tigers he's jerking around here. All this said, I don't hate Jason Benetti. I like him way better than Mario, and I certainly like him a lot a lot better than Shep. I even like him better than George Kell, and George was the PxP guy when I was eleven, which for many fans is the age at which baseball freezes as being in its best-ever state. The only other PxP I liked as well as Benetti was Josh Lewin, who worked his games in a sort of similarly jocular vein, if not as flamboyantly. As I've posted here many times, Benetti can be very good when he's discussing the game at hand, and his sly jokes can work pretty well in that context, and I can watch an entire game of Jason Benetti and be quite OK with that. What I don't like is when he goes off on protracted sidebars about millennial pop culture or this or that, which are basically opportunities to demonstrate how clever he can be. He didn't do this with the White Sox so much because Steve Stone, a 40+-year baseball broadcaster himself, knew how to keep him in check and on track. Benetti doesn't have a guy like that here, so we are the beneficiaries, as it were, of his occasional poor impulse control. In the end, I would be fine if Benetti hung around to do a couple decades of Tigers baseball, but there's no way he's going to do that, because he has his eyes on a bigger prize. So I will be neither surprised nor heartbroken when he does leave, and the only potential downside I can see is that the Tigers might replace him with a far worse PxP like Mario or Shep.

I've listened to Dan Dickerson for several entire baseball seasons and he has never annoyed me even once. I agree that we are lucky to have Benetti in comparison to the last couple of years.

I don't know where you got this, but I don't hate Jason Benetti.

Thanks for sharing this, although "there is some belief around the game" doesn't sound like very much of a movement afoot. In fact, since he didn't attribute the idea to anybody, not to the commissioners office or even to anyone anonymously by profession, I wouldn't doubt that the idea came strictly out of the head of Jesse Rogers himself.

They are very good when they discuss the intricacies of the game in front of them. Benetti’s sly bon mots can work very well in that context.

Fortune smiled on me last night. I had gotten all the way down to 26th and Western when the radio told me the game was delayed with no expected start time, so I turned around and went home. I was going alone and I didn’t want to hang out who knows how many hours just to have them postpone or cancel. The game did start up about an hour late, so I thought I would certainly lose my chance to see baseball infamy, but the Sox overcame a 2-0 deficit with three runs in the eighth, and then hung on by what’s left of their fingernails for the win over a better last-place team. Now the Sox are going for loss 121 tonight, and it’s going to be a nice night, so I’ll definitely be there. And if they win tonight, my wife and i are already going on Thursday afternoon with friends of hers, so my chances of seeing #121 are prettehhh, prettehhh, pretteh good. And if the White Sox happen to sweep the Angels, I’ll be coming in to Detroit to (hopefully) see the Tigers clinch over them. If the White Sox end up winning out the rest of their games, a la 2003 Tigers … well, I won’t know what else to say at that point except “baseball, man.”

Is there a movement afoot for Baseball to ban openers? If so, then that one has gotten by me.

What a swell guy. I’m still going to listen to Dan Dickerson.

“SIIIIIIIGN MEEEEEEE!”

Twins lose! Magic number is now four. Twins suck so much lately they can’t hang a 100th loss on a terrible team.

Someone identified it as six after today’s game. But you’re right, it is seven when considering the tiebreaker. However, the Royals’ magic number against us is six. Speaking only for myself, I don’t think I can consider us as having a magic number against them as long as their magic number is less than ours, because they’re in the driver’s seat, not we. But technically, i agree we have a magic number of seven.

KC just won, but they’re not the important game anyway.

if we end up with the exact combination of six of Tigers wins and Royals losses, don’t the Royals win the tiebreaker?

I don’t think we have a magic number against Kansas City until we clear them.

Would it be funnier if he’d replace Spiderman’s head with Cy Young’s head?

Harris Walz sign humblebrag 😉

I’m gonna predict he’s an opener against the White Sox.

Magic number now five over the Twins.