9/25/24 6:40PM Rays @ Tigers

[Tigeraholic1]

Comerica Park - Detroit, MI

Game Time Forecast: Partly Sunny 71

Listen: 97.1 The Ticket

Watch: Bally Sports Det

Starters:

RHP Zack Littell

RHP Keider Montero

[casimir]

11 hours ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

"Might as well get ready for the postseason."  I mean, what else could Skubal be saying there?

[chasfh]

40 minutes ago, casimir said:

"Might as well get ready for the postseason."  I mean, what else could Skubal be saying there?

“SIIIIIIIGN MEEEEEEE!”

[theroundsquare]

translates to "PAAAAAAAY MEEEEEE!"

and they should 

[Tigermojo]

I WANT FREE CURLY FRIES 

[chasfh]

The Detroit Tigers pitching staff is ...

[papalawrence]

I could see his name popping up for potential manager positions. I hope Det does whatever it can to keep him long term

[papalawrence]

Maybe Det can pluck Steve Stone from Chicago as well. Imho he paired very well with Benetti. When Det played Chicago in years past, I would often choose their broadcast to watch the games

 

Edit - dangit, meant to post in Det regular season thread

Edited September 25 by papalawrence

[Sports_Freak]

18 hours ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

Comerica Park - Detroit, MI

Game Time Forecast: Partly Sunny 71

Listen: 97.1 The Ticket

Watch: Bally Sports Det

Starters:

RHP Zack Littell

RHP Keider Montero

LET'S GO!!!

[Shades of Deivi Cruz]

Littell has been pretty good since coming back off the IL, but he also doesn't tend to go deep in games. Let's get his count up early!

[chasfh]

Boy, the beat media sure do miss Al Avila and his way of making their jobs so, so much easier. 

 

[oblong]

man, I wish I could read that but $10 a month is too much for a newspaper nowadays.  

[romad1]

if this run keeps going and isn't just a pleasant surprise we will need a song.  May i direct you to the works of Fat Les and his Vindaloo he made for one of the various failed England team efforts in the World Cup.  I also liked the New Order one World In Motion. 

 

the latter is hilarious because the lyrics are pretty damn gay but also work for the sports stuff as well. 

[romad1]

Maybe this 

 

[romad1]

On a certain level stealing something from Boston (the Aerosmith riff) would be perfect. 

[gehringer_2]

39 minutes ago, oblong said:

man, I wish I could read that but $10 a month is too much for a newspaper nowadays.  

nothing in there we haven't rehashed here a dozen times.

There is nothing wrong with holding that Avila did not do a bad job acquiring young talent but that that is only one  - albeit important part, of a GM/POBOs job and that Avila was bad at almost all of the of the rest of those parts. His FA signings were on balance bad, he got his clock cleaned as a trader, and while he may have known what direction the franchise had to go coaching/technology wise, he lacked sufficient energy/urgency about getting there.

[HeyAbbott]

Al couldn't develop film, let alone ballplayers.

[Sports_Freak]

3 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

nothing in there we haven't rehashed here a dozen times.

There is nothing wrong with holding that Avila did not do a bad job acquiring young talent but that that is only one  - albeit important part, of a GM/POBOs job and that Avila was bad at almost all of the of the rest of those parts. His FA signings were on balance bad, he got his clock cleaned as a trader, and while he may have known what direction the franchise had to go coaching/technology wise, he lacked sufficient energy/urgency about getting there.

He also was bad at hiring people to develop players. Looking at the roster, there's a lot of players he drafted. But it took better people to find the right team to actually develop them.

[Sports_Freak]

Watching the Houston game, the announcers are actually discussing who the 'Stros will play in the 2nd round after they're done with the Tigers.

[KL2]

[RatkoVarda]

bumper sticker on Tony Paul's car: "Al Avila - Not Completely Incompetent"

[Tigeraholic1]

19 minutes ago, RatkoVarda said:

bumper sticker on Tony Paul's car: "Al Avila - Not Completely Incompetent"

C'mon, we all know this is really Trams team. Avila just gets all the credit.

[IdahoBert]

Although I don’t have much data to base this assumption on, I always got the feeling the Tigers had an unsystematic way of developing players.

The broadcasting staff at least gives this impression now where they talk about something akin to a “Tigers Way“ of developing players from the earliest stages up to the major league level, which by inference means they didn’t used to do it this way, that there wasn’t really a tiger’s way.

They talk about how the new guys who have come up, have risen through the system and been developed in the same manner so I get the impression that the system in the past used to be kind of scattershot. 

[chasfh]

13 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

He also was bad at hiring people to develop players. Looking at the roster, there's a lot of players he drafted. But it took better people to find the right team to actually develop them.

Exactly this.

So Al Avila drafted and signed some young ballplayers. You could have done that. Maybe I could have done that. Acquiring the ballplayers is, relatively speaking, the easy part. Developing them into contributing big leaguers is the hard part, and as a wise man once said, Al Avila couldn't develop film.

Half of this lazy article was naming all these guys on the team who were first acquired by Avila. The list included first-rounders Tork, Mize, Manning, Faedo. These are success stories? With periodic exceptions, they've ranged from flashes of slightly above average to awful. Tony Paul also named Jackson Jobe, who has even stepped on the field during a game yet. Of all the first rounders, Riley Greene was the one nut the squirrel found, and he was a consensus pick at #5 overall everyone would have taken—as with Tork and Mize.

Then there are the second rounders: Parker Meadows, who took six years to become a contributor here. Kind of a long time for a second rounder, but that's how long it took to iron out the funk in his game. Dingler took four to get his shot. That's pretty normal. But between them? Daniel Cabrera, stuck in neutral and serving as org depth, and Nick Quintana, now floundering in the Reds' system. Al's last two second-rounders, Izaac Pacheco (2021) and Peyron Graham (2022), are still dog-paddling their way through A-ball (although Graham did find his way to Erie for the last game of the season).

Third-rounders? Kody Clemens (nepo pick). Andre Lipicius. Trei Cruz. Either gone, done, or out of the Top 30.

In the meantime, who have been the most impactful picks for us? Tarik Skubal (9th round). Colt Keith (5th). Kerry Carpenter (19th). Will Vest (12th). Basically lotto ticket rounds, even Colt Keith, the only fifth-rounder from that draft worth a damn.

How about undrafted free agent signings? Tony Paul names Jason Foley, Wenceel Perez, and Keider Montero. All from 2016. Foley started seeing trigger time in 2021 and did OK, but didn't really turn it on until last year, the first season of the Harris administration. The other two took eight years—or well clear of the Avila misdevelopment curse—to even start contributing at the big league level.

But here's the main takeaway, in case you're missing it: not one of these guys was a success during the Avila years. Not one. They didn't succeed until Scott Harris came onboard and remade the entire scouting and development function. Even Riley Greene, the one success story Al Avila could have fairly claimed, didn't start revving it up until Harris came aboard.

The reason any of Avila's guys are even in the organization is because Harris did a deep dive into everyone in the system, keeping those he and his team thought they could save, and getting rid of the rest. In any large group of players there will always be a few who can be saved. That's what's happening here, not Al Avila with some genius nine-year plan in which he cleverly plans to fail spectacularly for seven years then succeeds only after he's been gone for two.

And don't get me started on the part about analytics. We're supposed to believe that Al Avila is basically the godfather of Tigers analytics, and Harris's contribution was merely to expand on its usage? I mean, really. Come on.

 

[oblong]

Agree with all of that. Players are not finished products when drafted.  There isn’t a super secret decoder to finding the good ones in the 13th round.  The franchise was epically bad at this going back to the 80s. It was written off as if they were victims of their own success either from low draft position or losing picks from FA signings. Bunk.