Where Do the Detroit Tigers Go From Here?
17 days ago, there was a light at the end of the tunnel for the Detroit Tigers incredibly painful multi-year rebuild. The Tigers had just stormed Minute Maid Park in Houston and stolen three straight road victories over one of Major League Baseball’s best teams, buoyed by the extra-base hit magic of Akil Baddoo, resurgent efforts on the hill from Matthew Boyd and Michael Fulmer, and a promising 7-inning scoreless gem from top prospect Casey Mize. For the first time in over a half-decade, it was okay to be hopeful. Maybe even okay for a chorus of Bless You Boys.
Boy, does time change quickly.
17 days later, any hope one could have held for the Tigers rebuild has been extinguished, sapped of life, swallowed by a black hole so as to be beyond sight. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, only a vast expanse of darkness. Since sweeping the Astros, the Tigers have dropped 15 of 17 games. Baddoo’s scorching start has completely evaporated, as he’s acquired just 4 hits in 42 at-bats since the Houston series, putting together a slash line of .095/.116/.262 in that span. His .378 OPS in that span would be good for the worst in baseball among qualified hitters.
The Tigers are dead last in baseball in runs per game (an unthinkably low 2.82), and their team wRC+(weighted runs created plus), a metric that measures offensive efficiency while attempting to eliminate extraneous variables like park factors, is a historically awful 71, where 80 is historically bad and 100 is league average. Perhaps a more familiar advanced metric is wins above replacement, or WAR. Per Fangraphs, the Tigers are posting a full team fWAR of -1.7. NEGATIVE ONE POINT SEVEN. It is the worst metric in baseball by 2.8 wins, trailing the Baltimore Orioles also abysmal mark of 1.1.
It is not a stretch to say that, four years after trading Justin Verlander and ushering in the rebuild phase after a decade long period of contention, the 2021 Tigers have the potential to be the worst team in the history of baseball.
So where do the Tigers go from here? It’s hard to imagine a single soul in the front office from Al Avila to an intern once consulted in a fringe manner on any matter remotely related to roster construction should be allowed to keep their job. Having even a slight hand in the makeup of this team is the equivalent of baseball malpractice, and it’s difficult to even label the Tigers as a Major League Baseball team in their current form.
As a fan, it’s become frustrating being asked to be patient, as Chris Illitch has urged during his propaganda appearances during games on Bally Sports Detroit. The organization has been feeding marching orders down the line to repeat the same word vomit of positive player development and processes, but how could that be possible? Two of the Tigers bright young pitchers in Casey Mize and Tarik Skubal have shown regression this year, not progress. In the shortened season last year, Skubal posted pedestrian numbers, with an FIP of 5.75 and xERA of 4.52. However, he displayed promise with his K% and the ability to draw swings and misses utilizing his fastball velocity and excellent spin rate on breaking pitches. Thus far, 2021 has been a different story. Down is the velocity, vanished is the spin rate, and his FIP and xERA have ballooned 8.23 and an astronomic 9.04 respectively.
The story for Casey Mize has been remarkably similar. While his numbers don’t have the same jarring differential year over year, they have been helped by his sterling start in Houston — by far the best of his career — in which he hurled seven scoreless innings of four hit baseball against the Astros prolific offense. Since that outing, Mize has posted an 8.29 ERA in three starts and allowed a Barrel% above 20% twice. His inability to miss bats has been a weakness since long before his Major League tenure, but the lack of any progress in that regard is stark.
So how is it that General Manager Al Avila or owner Chris Illitch can tell fans with a straight face that their player-development is promising? Top prospects Matt Manning and Riley Greene have not come along as quickly as expected, failing to break into the Majors the way their peers Mize and Skubal did. Additionally, the Tigers have seen little if any progress out of position player prospects like Isaac Paredes or Willi Castro, who has been with the MLB team since 2019 and is currently posting the worst slash line of his career at .191/.232/.277. Of the prospects acquired in the Verlander trade, Daz Cameron, Franklin Perez, and Jake Rogers, only Cameron still possesses any real hope of living up to his billing, as Perez has had his career derailed by injury and Avila himself admitted the organization mismanaged Rogers’s development track (seems to be a pattern).
To put it bluntly, only a fool could take an honest look at what is happening in Detroit and spin any of it as positive. In that vein, Al Avila and Chris Illitch are either fools, incapable of performing the task of rebuilding this team, or liars. In the case of Avila, it is likely ineptitude. His CV prior to ascending to General Manager relied heavily on the achievements of Dave Dombrowksi, a GM who is not exactly known for stellar player development, as he typically goes about his business by gutting teams’ farm systems in favor of blockbuster trades and massive contracts. Dombrowski’s departure from the Boston Red Sox left their minor league system vapid and their payroll bloated, so much so that his successor traded a 27-year-old MVP winner in Mookie Betts who had yet to exit his salary arbitration period just to get out from under David Price’s contract.
Since taking over in the space left by Dombrowski, Avila’s tenure has been notable more for the trades he didn’t make (the team reportedly received separate offers including Alex Bregman and Javier Baez for Fulmer) than the trades he did, all of which have been unremarkable and none of which have the Tigers received the best player or prospect. Aside from the trades, his free agent acquisitions have almost exclusively been one-year deals for middling players well past their prime, who are, for lack of a better term, useless to a Major League Club after the month of April.
In the case of Chris Illitch, it might be disinterest. Running a historically awful team is certainly cheaper than running a contender, and the many hideously orange Little Caesar’s billboards plastered around the fences at Comerica Park in 2021, as well as the beautiful new headquarters across the street on Woodward Avenue, suggest the pizza empire is the Illitch family’s primary interest. To be clear, that’s fine. However, to continue to run this team into the ground is disrespectful not only to the fanbase, but to the storied history of the Detroit Tigers.
For the Tigers to be this deep into a rebuild and continue to not just be an abject failure, but to post numbers that suggest we are potentially watching the worst team in the history of professional baseball is unacceptable. The organization is in a state of disrepair, and the only solution is a complete change in leadership.