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Not only that, but for teams serious about winning in October, having four guys in your rotation who can shut down any other team is the holy grail.

Sure, we could construct a bunch of lopsided trades with a bunch of teams that we’d be hard-pressed to pass up but which will never be offered. It’s not realistic but it’s fun, and Skubal will still be here on August 1, and to start 2025. BTW, Coby Mayo is minutes away from being called up to the Orioles to take third base from Ramon Urias, and he’s probably going to end up at first anyway, and we already have a bunch of those players in our system right now.

You may or may not have phrased it this way to make my evaluation of Avila’s tenure and legacy seem unreasonable, but I will cop to it as being a reasonable position to take. Avila was fired not only because he’d been failing for years on end, but because it was obvious even to the guy who didn’t want to see it that Avila had no idea how to stop failing. And even if any of Avila’s players do stay here and succeed, I will definitely give the Harris team credit for saving them and making them useful to the team, versus giving the blind squirrel equal credit for leaving Harris the nut in the first place. In any event, there won’t be more than a handful of those guys here in a couple years anyway. Randy Smith was indeed horrible, although I’m not so sure Juan turning him down saved him, because he was gone barely a year later. Remember this? Randy tried to trade Juan at the 2000 deadline to the Yankees for Ricky Ledee and Drew Henson.

With spotty success at best. There were a couple key hires he can take credit for—A.J., Chris Fetter, Ryan Garko—but the majority of people working in the system now were hired by these same guys or by the Harris front office. People also give Avila success for the team going into analytics, but I reasonably wonder whether it was all window dressing, as I more or less state in my BYB article here from over six years ago. If it was an actual investment, we got nothing out of it while he remained here, as we can see from the vast majority of trades and signings he made. And the data science we are taking advantage of now came in after he left.

This, I agree with, which is why I believe Harris won't—indeed, can't—do this. Do this and they might as well lock up the stadium to keep any remaining fans from getting in.

Lots of posters here were, and not just one or two guys. I was personally getting a lot of static for insisting that Avila was an abject failure by people who countered me with how many Avila guys were still on the team and in the system, and apparently because Harris didn't release them all when he came on board, Avila gets the credit for bringing them on board and helping to build the next Tigers winner. I even got hammered for saying Avila did not make a genius move by drafting Skubal in the ninth round and Carpenter 19th round. That was just a month ago! As for Avila being worse than Randy Smith, you've probably seen how people here roundly reject that assertion, although I'm probably the closest guy to you here on that point.

Javy's defense isn't great this year. It isn't even particularly good. That's what's going to make it easier to cut him before we carve the turkey after the Lions game.

Fair point. He’s likely to be here, too, provided he doesn’t spend two of the next three seasons on the List.

I don’t know, there are a lot of people who post here who like to make predictions of future Tigers teams that invariably include all these guys we have in our system right now. So for them it would be a revelation, and maybe even one that offends them at that. No one likes to Adopt-a-Tiger who’s on the fast track to Nowheresville.

As much as people want to give Al Avila equal (or even more!) credit for the eventual revival of the Tigers by dint of our still having guys on the team he acquired, I think what we will find is that almost all of them will be gone by 2027. We’ll definitely have Colt Keith, we’ll probably still have Riley Greene, and possibly Reese Olson, and maybe even Tarik Skubal if we can sign him. But it wouldn’t floor me to see practically all the rest gone, including perhaps Tork and Mize and Meadows, probably Perez and some bubble-40 guys like Campos and Workman and Flores, and certainly Manning and Kreidler and Baddoo and Rogers, and probably all of Avila’s relievers. All gone. Bookmark this post so you can lambast me, or the memory thereof, in 2-1/2 years. 😁

Hopefully, because I think the chances we move Tork in a trade this year is low single digits at best. On the flip side, there could be an audacious move that Harris makes that could really shake up the organization and continue scrubbing away the remains of Al Avila’s thumbprints on it.

It doesn’t matter how blue an area is as long as they are still subject to cristofascist laws passed by their blood-red state legislatures about choice, gender identity, religion in the public square, voting rights, and the like.

😉

I have not seen anything national yet suggesting Tork is a dead loss. The only I’ve seen that expressed is here.

Good question. This was my out of the box idea from a couple days ago, packaging him with Flaherty to goose the return on a deal. We wouldn’t take a bag of balls for him.

He might end up being a part of the wave of Harris pickups that will wash the Avila guys out into the sea.

They look Shopped. I mean his.

How about Jung at 2B, Keith at 1B, and sell Tork at the deadline?

Aha, there we go …

And Trump has been teeing up in his rallies that he is going to pardon Assange, and at that point it’s basically 50/50 that he gets a job in the administration.

Casey Mize is now showing up this today: https://stathead.com/tiny/Rty1f

I’ve been gone all night and didn’t see the game. I just looked at the box and, holy sh*t, Casey Mize. I just did a query, and Casey Mize is literally only the second guy in modern baseball history to strike out at least 10, walk nobody, give up at least nine hits, and do it all in 4-1/3 innings or less: https://stathead.com/tiny/JjwEf This is a very modern baseball thing to do. Nobody could have done this before the last ten or fifteen years, because of how the game has evolved.

If he knew Demeter was a greek goddess when he was a kid, it probably got him pushed into a bunch of puddles by the other kids, too. 😉

Sounds like a typical media gripe. It makes the beat guys' job a little harder to have executives not afflicted by logorrhea, or as though the GM is on sodium thiopental. Boo hoo for them. Besides, I actually think the things the coaches and players do say to the media are a lot more interesting since Harris and the new people he's hired behind the scenes have come aboard. They are actually talking about process, which I find fascinating, instead of hiding behind opaque disneyfied jockspeak. I'm all for that.

I don't think executives in the game share the same prejudice borne of disappointment that you and others here have about Tork. I'm fairly certain they think of him as a massive hitting talent who's simply flailing about in Detroit. The guy set all kinds of records in college. I'd bet there are at least a dozen other organizations that think they can fix him.