BACK TO THE FUTURE – PART FOUR

by Holly Horning

“No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.”

– William Hazlitt

Today, let’s conclude the discussion that helps explain the Tigers’ rebuild and sheds more light about what may be expected down the road.

We want to know exactly how all of this is going to play out.  We want to know about the team’s priorities, timeline and when that championship roster will finally be completed.

We want to know when the Tigers will be contending again.

We wonder why it took so long to finally hire a competent manager who could effectively harness the talent he was given.  And why it has taken so long to start saying “buh-bye” to members of the decades-old clique.

In Parts One and Two, we started to get some logical explanations.  I wrote about the need to go back in time and analyze the ownership under both Mike Ilitch and his son, Chris. 

In Part Three, we looked at Dave Dombrowski’s legacy and the early years of Al Avila’s reign as his successor.

If you didn’t read them – or need to review the issues – here they are again because it’s important to know both owners and their GMs in order to help us understand why the present and future are playing out in the manner that they are.

BACK TO THE FUTURE – PART ONE

BACK TO THE FUTURE – PART TWO

BACK TO THE FUTURE – PART THREE

By reviewing the history, we come to the real purpose of this blog.  The need to understand is because history is constantly open to evolution and interpretation.  For many actions, it takes time for everything to play out and come to fruition. 

Because history often gets misinterpreted early in the making.  Sometimes we need to experience time, distance and the results before returning to those earlier days in order to make sense of the present.

Time has the ability to allow us to see things more clearly.  To eliminate the assumptions we made early in the process.  To be able to stand back and view actions in a more detached manner.

To be able to also detach from our emotions which may have clouded the entire process.

With the Tigers, we need to take a step back and reassess what has happened with this team.

We need to get rid of the assumptions we’ve been making all these years.  Those stubborn beliefs that just may be holding us back in our honest assessments.

We need to erase the board and start over.  And if we come to the same conclusions, then so be it.

But it’s important that we don’t remain stubborn in our beliefs and embrace the possibility that we were wrong in our initial assessments.

If we see things differently, and consider more possibilities, we may just come to believe that there were different motivational factors at play.  Or at least, different strategies.

Most important? Correcting certain beliefs will also change how we evaluate others who came later.

In the end, isn’t it worthwhile to see and understand the different factors that may have had important roles in determining the Tigers’ path?

I think so.

Considering the Tigers, we may just make sense of moves made in the past that didn’t seem logical back then – but now do.

It’s now time to move past the previous discussions of possible motivations of both Ilitchs and the actions of the past and current GMs.  It’s time to turn our attention to the actual tearing down years.  The messy years.

What do we know?

First of all, every move dating back to 2017 is due to the team Chris Ilitch inherited from his father.   (To be factually correct, he doesn’t own the team as it’s in a trust.  But he is the de facto owner.)

His father passed in early 2017 so one has to assume that Chris started taking over sometime in 2016.

And as I wrote in a previous blog in this series, and confirmed recently by several financial writers, he inherited a mess.  One of MLB’s highest payrolls with an ageing roster and expectations of an imminent and significant decline in performance.

No successful businessman is going to pour even more money into an organization that needed a complete overhaul.  And Chris undoubtedly was familiar with the crash-and-burn Phillies who were in similar circumstances and waited too long in an attempt to unload expensive contracts.  By the time Philadelphia decided they needed to cut payroll, they couldn’t.  There were no takers for their older, expensive players and their rebuild has lasted 8 years.

Ilitch had no choice but to tear down the organization starting in 2017 while he could still unload contracts.  That was his only option.  That is, unless you want to slowly kill the team and its fanbase by dragging it out for years.

Teardowns are always messy.  They are hard to endure.  They create bad feelings.  And they make fans very, very resentful, esp. when their favorite players are traded.

Understand that we can agree that certain destructive moves have to be made in order for teams to get better.  And that while we understand what needs to be done, we also don’t have to like it.

You can’t really fault Chris for what he did.  He was cleaning up after his father.

But if you’re going to blame him for anything, it’s who he put in charge of trading his players.

Al Avila.

But did he really have a choice?  As I wrote in Part Three, teams don’t fire their GMs in a tear down.  They serve an essential purpose by taking the heat meant for owners and doing all of the messy stuff that no one else wants to touch.

And you don’t hire a new GM and spend more money, just for them to trade away their players.  It’s not a wise move in any way.

Besides, who is going to willingly sign on to be a GM for a team whose sole purpose is to tear down a roster?  No one.  It’s a career killer.

You hire a new GM when your team is rebuilding and renewing.

Now, to Avila’s defense, it’s very hard to trade players and receive decent value in return when everyone else in baseball knows you are tearing down.  Knowing that you have to dump salary.  Teams recognizing that contracts have to be dumped and having the leverage to negotiate them down in order to get a great deal or two.

Yes, the trades were horrible.  And yes, Avila was also put in a tough position.

But he was also too loose-lipped.  He gave away too much information.  He couldn’t successfully sell the players needing to be traded.  At least not like his former boss who could have sold snow to Eskimos.

Also consider that back in 2017, the Tigers barely had an analytics department.  They were still using an antiquated system to determine real value and talent in trades.  Essentially, trying to find valuable players was a crapshoot.  The Tigers were, for the most part, flying blind. 

It would be another 2+ years before the Tigers would have a viable analytics department.

And that was not Avila’s fault.  The blame goes to Mr. I and Dave Dombrowski.  Avila was the one who finally brought the system in.

Now, consider this.  The first “official” year of the tear down was 2017.  The Tigers lost 98 games that year and had a payroll of $207 million.  It was the second highest in MLB.

Ouch.

But there were other expenses, too.  I’ve written that the Tigers had MLB’s highest operating expenses in all of MLB and almost double that of the next team.

That means that other cuts needed to be made.

Which is why they kept Brad Ausmus in 2017.  He would have been owed the money anyway.  And no team with 98 losses is going to go out and hire another manager and pay two of them. 

Also consider that when you make any new hire, it is increasingly harder and more expensive to get rid of them down the road.

Simply put, 2017 was a throw-away year.  Keep the failed manager and his ineffective coaches.  It saves you money in the end.  In a year that doesn’t matter at all because no matter how you cut it, your team is going to be excruciatingly horrible.

Moving to 2018, the Tigers were still in tear-down mode.  They needed to cut another $80 million to get them down to just below $130 million.  Even with that, they still sat around the MLB average payroll despite another year in which they would lose 98 games.

Anticipating that it would take awhile longer to tear things down, there was no need to hire top talent just yet.  You don’t buy expensive tires to put on a clunker and you don’t hire top talent to tear down a roster.  You hire them when you want to build a successful roster.

You don’t get rid of Dave Littlefield and David Chadd just yet.  You need inexpensive seat warmers.  Besides, hiring their replacements would cost money.

The Tigers had just started rebuilding their farms system with top draft picks but not enough yet to start making a difference.

All of the old clique and hangers-on were on life support.  They probably didn’t know it yet, but they had their expiration dates already stamped.

Now, let’s move to the dugout.

The Tigers hired a new manager in the name of Ron Gardenhire.  He was unemployed as were his former coaches from the Twins.   Long-term unemployed individuals are eminently less expensive.  Besides, Gardy was one of Jim Leyland’s best friends.  The Tigers probably got him on the cheap.

A current manager – or rising star – would never come to a team that was in tear down mode.  Again, it would be a career-killer.  The best candidates are those with no perceived future.  Guys who really just wanted to stick in the game or needed a paycheck.

In 2018, it would still be awhile before the Tigers emerged from the cellar.  The organization simply needed babysitters.  Babysitters who could smile through it all, crack jokes and put on a brave front.

Which is why long-term coaches like Lloyd McClendon and Dave Clark stayed.  It was guaranteed employment as a reward for loyalty to guys who were unlikely to be hired by other teams once they left.

Potentially, the Tigers maybe even saved money by bringing in Gardy and his crew.

So if we’re going to be truly justified in criticizing people within this organization, it is with the concerted effort to tank.

Tanking is the strategy more and more teams are using to rebuild more cheaply.  It is all about purposely being as bad as possible in order to cut as much salary and expenses as possible.  It’s about knowingly putting a non-competitive team on the field.  It is about being as bad as you can so you can get top draft picks and reap the financial rewards MLB gives out to baseball’s worst teams.

For example, when the Houston Astros went through their tanking, they were also MLB’s most profitable team.  They had multiple revenue streams and benefits/rewards coming into them.  And every other team took note.  With each year, more and more teams are adopting tanking strategies.

Tanking, btw, is the top issue for this year’s new CBA negotiations.

The Tigers practiced tanking for 4 years.  This is where fans should place their anger, if any.

It’s also why the Tigers kept all of these people through the tanking years.  It was easier and cheaper just to keep warm bodies through the tanking process and not make any changes.  It simply didn’t matter.

But at some point, estimated to be in 2018, Chris Ilitch started to invest in the team behind the scenes.  The Tigers had started to expand their analytics department and were buying the latest technology to be used in the field and in the Front Office.

Things would start to shift after the 2020 season.  With the premature departure of Ron Gardenhire and possible anticipation that top talent would become available shortly.

And that’s where we will pick up in Back to the Future – Part 5.  A blog that explores the first year of rebuilding and the changes that came with it.  A blog that will help explain the timeline and rationale for the moves the Tigers started to make.

Stay tuned….

(To keep us focused on our discussions, please keep your 3-4 sentence comments focused on the tear down process through the Gardenhire years.  You’ll have the chance to address the 2021 season and future going forward in the next blog.)

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