chasfh

He had a really good year so little wonder he wanted to opt out. There is a possibility he comes back, although he’ll want something like 2/20 or better, and who knows how the new regime feels about that for relievers. There’s also a chance he ends up with Cleveland.

This is where the managers really earn their pay.

The Latin AFA information is freely available on Spotrac. The reports on Avila's draft "strategy" passes the smell test with flying colors. As for whether what Avila and his regime did could be called a rebuild: that's fine, I will concede and agree to label it a "rebuild" to make people happy. But even so, that doesn't mean the front office tried very hard at it. To all appearances I'd say they more like hardly tried at it. They've built essentially nothing, and to the degree they get anything out of the five guys at the top of Al's future dream roster, four of them were the consensus obvious first-round picks everyone else would have made, so I don't give him much credit for just pushing the button; and the fifth guy had to go outside the system a couple winters ago to train himself at Driveline so he could adequately develop as a pitcher in the Tigers' system.

I think that might go back to a time when Ilitch was considered a hockey-first guy and basically a baseball dilettante. That was before the last straw, when Avila humiliated the organization with his Peter-principled incompetence for the umpteenth time. I don't think Baby Doc actually wanted to finally step in and shake it all up—I think he felt he had to, because the industry noise surrounding Al Avila was simply too loud to ignore anymore. I would bet that if Scott Harris can successfully begin an actual rebuild of this team, and achieve some visible successes along the way, Baby Doc will recede into the same background he occupied for almost \the entire Avila tenure. It's basically a case of, "Here are the keys, you're on your own, just don't crash the car in front of all the neighbors like the other guy did."

Can you share where you can get a short-term CD at 4%? Because the best I could find, at least a couple weeks ago, was Sallie Mae (4.05% at 5 years) and Synchrony (4.01% at 3+ years). EDIT: Then I looked at the Synchrony site after this post and see they have a 4.21% at 15 months as of today.

It's true that I'm basing my opinion of Scott Harris on his pedigree and the words he has said since being hired, and none at all on the fact that Chris Ilitch hired him or likes him. I am excited because his stated vision aligns with what I hoped the vision would turn to for this team in the post-Avila era. I am definitely giving Harris the benefit of the doubt, and will be disappointed and question him only once he has repeated failures due to lack of foresight, preparation, planning, or execution. Until then, all aboard!

Is there someone else you'd prefer to have been hired for the role? Or, if not an actual person in mind, a preferred type versus Harris's type? Or are you concerned only about his lack of specific GM or PBO experience?

I said at the time I liked the hubris of the deal and was fine with it not because I thought Meadows clearly had a better future than Paredes, which I did not and still do not believe, but because Paredes was never going to get a fair shot with the Tigers. He got less of a chance to make it here than Travis freaking Demeritte did, for cry eye ...

Talk about a pretty sweet deal: they could literally shoot the guy dead at high noon on Fifth Avenue and, in the eyes of the Foxified universe, successfully pin it on Antifa.

Well, at least I'm in good company here. It's no shame to be accused of lying by you. Fine, as you wish. I will give my closing argument and we can be done with it. A rebuilding team moves aggressively into the Latin American market to find prospects. Under Avila, the Tigers signed fewer Latin AFAs than even the average MLB team. A rebuilding team scours the non-Latin markets for players. The Avila Tigers acquired exactly zero players outside of three countries, and that includes none from actual baseball countries like Colombia, Mexico, and Panama. A rebuilding team also scours the waiver wire for freely-available talent. The Avila Tigers fielded fewer players off the waiver wire than even the average team, an average which includes playoff teams, which have little need for the waiver wire. The Angels, Orioles, and Mariners fielded double the waiver-claimed players the Tigers did. A rebuilding team trades current assets for actual prospects. The Tigers dumped so many All-Stars, future award winners, and future Hall of Famers for flotsam and jetsam that I don't really have to list them out here. Of the players you named as your shining examples of Avila's competent trading skills, only one is on the 40-man roster, and practically everyone here except me wants that guy gone. The rest are either out of the organization, still TBD, and Austin Meadows (acquired by trading Paredes AND a draft pick), which, who knows what's going on there. A rebuilding team takes the draft beyond the first round seriously. Everyone pretty much knew who Avila was going to take with their high first picks, since every other team would have taken those guys as well. But beyond that it's been reported that the Tigers were "historically disorganized when it came to preparing for the draft", and they "would leave all the research and planning until 10 days before the draft and then do marathon sessions of discussion about who they would select. One Front Office executive said they were all so tired near the end that there was always a rush just to get it over with." Add this all up and we do not have the organized activities of a team in serious rebuild mode. We have the disparate, even desperate, acts of a team hardly trying at all and basically phoning it in. No matter how many random examples get trotted out, the evidence is clear: Avila and the Tigers did not embark on a serious rebuild. They treaded water. They didn't plan for a carefully-considered rebuild—they basically winged it and hoped to get by and get lucky. Now, finally, we have a PBO who will undertake the actual hard work, research, and preparation that the Avila regime either didn't know how to do, couldn't be bothered to do, or some combination of both. Finally—a light at the end of the long, dark tunnel. 🤞

Speaking of semantics—just because they call it a "rebuild" does not mean it's an actual rebuild. The Avila regime paid no attention to the lower rounds of the draft; were underrepresented in the Latin American AFA market; were completely absent from the Asian market, did not make trades to build the team for the future, did not scour the waiver wire looking for opportunities; and did not sign undervalued free agents for the future. All they did was tank—giving up all-stars and future Hall-of-Famers for organizational flotsam so they could maximize their losses to collect top first-round picks, while occasionally dabbling in the Rule 5 draft. They endeavored to do the very least they could possibly get away with to be considered rebuilding, and they didn't accomplish even that. Come on, give up and finally admit it: the Tigers weren't rebuilding to build a solid foundation for the future—they were treading water and cashing revenue-sharing checks. What you call rebuilding is actually what Scott Harris and his team are embarking upon right now. Anything positive they get coming from the prior regime is not the residue of good planning—it's the result of no-plan-having luck.

Ummm … 😅?

It’s not a rebuild if it goes on for seven seasons and there are no playoff appearances and the team is no better than it was when it started. It was a dismantling. The actual rebuild started September 19.

Becuase they've been lied to that government is the problem.

Voter fraud. Arrest them en masse and ship them off to concentr ... err, detention centers to protect democracy.

Someone's gonna die, and soon. Then the floodgates might open.

As it turns out, it never was a rebuild.

If the Lions are capable of beating any team on their schedule except the Bills and they're 1-7, then Dan Campbell's not the guy. "But they're injured". It's the NFL. Everyone's injured.

Betcha a sawbuck on that one?

The housecleaning continues apace.

I ran down Chris Ilitch as hard as anyone else here. I accused him of being a dilettante at best and as uncaring at worse. I feared he was going subsume the Tigers under all his other businesses because of the cash cow nature of owning a baseball team. I basically accused him of being a hockey guy only. I believed all this based on the relentless losing under the apparently protected Avila regime, exacerbated by the hiring of Ron Gardenhire even after touting this computer program called Caesar that he claimed would basically bring the Tigers into this century. Like you, the moves Ilitch made to first hire A.J., and then to dump Avila and hire an exec from a forward-thinking organization, has turned my thinking some. I now have confidence that he does care about this team after all and is willing to put the team in a position to win, versus just letting whatever happen and cashing the checks. I’m not going to project onto Ilitch what I would like him to in terms of signing this or that free agent this winter, or spending X hundred million on payroll. I don’t know what Ilitch is going to do when we get certain pieces into place and we are just a move or two away from being favorites to play into November, in a few years I presume. But I do feel better about the idea that he’s not going to just go cheap as possible on the team and just accept whatever result happens and simply bank the loot. I guess that’s still somewhere in the range of outcomes, but I feel better that it occupies a small sliver and not a healthy chunk of that pie. I want the organization to do what it takes to win, whatever that may be, and I don’t care how much Ilitch ultimately spends on payroll, just so long as it doesn’t make the difference between winning pennants and losing out on wild cards.

Fair and proven out by fairly recent experience.