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I've been wondering about that. The Tigers are a family-run organization that values loyalty highly and promotes from within to maintain a tight circle of decision-makers across decades, so I wonder how effectively someone can come in from the outside and change everything from top to bottom, turning everything upside down even in the service to bringing the organization up to current snuff. Tightly-run organizations tend to resist big fast change. It will all depend on how much of a taste for breaking things Chris Ilitch has.

Maybe not. But maybe. Everything is a people business.

We've already gone the ex-scout route. I think I'd like to try someone with more broad-based executive decision-making on their resume.

They could probably get almost any GM candidate with little experience and modest qualifications and who's currently on the beach for just about any price they want. It may be harder and more expensive to pry a rising star who has a future in a functional top-tier organization, if they want, to come to a mess where the owner publicly throws his former employees under the bus.

I agree with you. I would not be surprised to learn that there was tension regarding player analysis between Avila/the old guard and Sartori-Menzin/the new wave.

It's a new day ... And dammit, I have hope now.

Even if you knew nothing else, just from the description above, you'd have to conclude as much.

What a complete abomination that was, from the word go.

Every customer base has a breaking point. This would have been one, and they Tigers may yet avoid it, because God damn right they’re listening to their best customers walking out the door.

What does this even mean? Only a fool would ignore the concerns that cause the exodus of a thousand of his best customers.

Everybody says that, but nobody who’s good wants to work for a jackass, so the price goes up.

This public statement will do wonders for recruiting. 😐 Jackass.

Yeah, I don't know that making Menzin permanent would necessarily doom us, but it would be a lot better, I think, to go outside. BTW, here is the news blurb written about Menzin when he was promoted last year: Menzin, 31, is responsible for all aspects of MLB operations, including player procurement, contract negotiations, roster construction, salary arbitration, league-wide rules, collective bargaining agreement compliance, professional scouting, advance scouting and video operations. So, he has already had a head start, but it's fair to wonder whether he is in part responsible for the mess of the last year, or whether he was making recommendations that were being overruled by the old guard still in charge. I have no sense of which might be correct.

Also, apparently, the gate is exactly what Al got. No kicking upstairs to President or anything like that, as I and other here have speculated might happen.

This is true, although it is likely we will get a read on what kind of new man we get in the job shortly after he is hired, based on whatever his pedigree and experience may be.

Yes, I would agree that now is better. After all, how much damage can Sam Menzin do in the next two months? 😏

Chris Ilitch couldn't ignore the steady drumbeat calling for Al's head. Once it migrated from the unaffiliated national media to the access-dependent local media, he was a goner. It was only a matter of when. I think the reason Al got the gate now instead of October was because the longer he stayed on the job, the worse he made Ilitch look, and if there is anything a tycoon cannot brook, it's being made to look bad.

I assumed they tampered with the voting machines since it is exactly what they accused Democrats of doing.

The only possible reason I can imagine that Trump took classified documents home with him is that he wanted to trade on them somehow. Maybe to sell or barter with them to hostile powers friendly to him; maybe to blackmail political, business, and personal rivals; maybe something else. But I gotta believe it's along those lines.

We are in the window we were led to believe we would be contending for championships right now. So I can understand why people are talking about counting on players next year, instead of waiting for another window five years down the road during which, based on what we now know from experience, we can’t expect this front office to prepare them to contend for championships, either.

When Stewart jacked 30 bombs at Erie in 2016, the Tigers didn’t have any analytics to speak of, something that could have diagnosed problems not visible to their naked eye, so their good old-fashioned scouting sucked eggs.