It wasn’t a decision that Tigers owner Chris Ilitch wanted to make. It was a decision he had to make, one he couldn’t put off any longer. Al Avila has been dismissed, mercifully, as the Tigers GM.
“Each and every season we need to make progress,” Ilitch said Wednesday at Comerica Park before the last-place Tigers took on the surging Guardians. “If we do that, we’ll ultimately reach our goals and our objectives. And this year, I think it became evident that we did not make progress, particularly at the major league level.”
Worse, the Tigers have regressed. They have erased the strides they made last year in their first season under A.J. Hinch. They are sliding toward their third last-place finish in the past four years. The losses were acceptable early in Avila’s tenure when the Tigers were forced into a rebuild, partly due to a flurry of poor free agency signings by Avila himself. They became intolerable after Avila swung and missed in free agency again.
“Not only with the Tigers but in everything I manage, I try to let our leaders lead and run their areas of responsibility,” Ilitch said. “I feel very comfortable that I’ve given Al the time and the resource to accomplish our mission. He made good progress up until this year when our progress stalled, and that’s really why I made the decision to make a change.”
A little over a month ago, Ilitch said he was pleased -- 'very pleased' -- with the Tigers’ progress this season despite their slow start. He even issued Avila a vote of confidence, noting his World Series winning background with the Marlins. Asked about those comments Tuesday, Ilitch re-read his words from a script before adding, “A slow start has turned into a difficult season.”
“The progress I referenced remains still the brightest spot of this season, and that is the progress shown by several prospects who debuted at the MLB level,” Ilitch said, pointing to pitchers Beau Brieske, Alex Faedo, Garrett Hill and outfielder Riley Greene.
“In additionally at the minor league level, there’s been continued progress in very important ways that will help us continue to find impact players for our roster in Detroit,” he went on. “We’ve seen continued development from players in the upper levels of our minor league system.”
And now Ilitch referenced Ryan Kreidler, Austin Bergner, Chance Kirby, Parker Meadows and Kerry Carpenter, the latter of whom was poised to make his MLB debut Wednesday night. It is the ultimate indictment of Avila’s tenure, of his ability to forge a future for the Tigers that Ilitch believed in, that only one of those nine players who represent promise for the big-league club has the look of a legitimate big-league player.
Ilitch had good reason to dismiss Avila well before he did. He could have done it a couple years ago when the Tigers had yet to reap any rewards from trading multiple stars at the outset of their rebuild, including Justin Verlander and J.D. Martinez. Instead, Ilitch quietly extended Avila midway through the 2019 season. He maintained that was the right decision on Tuesday because “from 2017 to 2021, the organization showed a lot of progress.” It certainly doesn’t look like it. The Tigers have promoted all of their top prospects and spent big last offseason and remain one of the worst clubs in the American League.
Injuries have been a culprit this season. So has regression up and down the lineup that’s resulted in one of the worst offenses in franchise history. One of Avila’s first overall draft picks might not pitch again until in 2024 due to Tommy John. The other is in Toledo trying to find the swing that abandoned him in Detroit. Barring another spending spree this winter – don’t count on it – it’s not clear where the Tigers go from here.
Asked if the Tigers might be forced to take a step back, to essentially rebuild the rebuild that was supposed to be over this year, Ilitch said, “The building of successful teams move at different paces. For us, the organization has made so much progress over the last few years. We just need to re-establish that momentum we had heading into this season and keep building toward our objectives.
“So the answer to your question is, no, I think we keep building. We have a lot of foundational pieces in place and we build on that.”
Ilitch talked frequently about the Tigers’ ‘objectives.’ The first one, he said, is to assemble a “winning team,” something they haven’t done in six years.
“And then we want to qualify for the playoffs and we want to win a World Series. The resources have been, and continue to be, available for us to build a winning team,” he said. “There’s no issue there.”
Ilitch is right: the issue for the Tigers isn’t money. They are a mid-market team with a mid-market payroll. So are the Minnesota Twins, Cleveland Guardians and Seattle Mariners, all of whom are in the AL playoff race. Ditto the Milwaukee Brewers in the NL. The issue is that the Tigers lack a clear path forward. They are a last-place team with a tapped-out farm system and a few big contracts already on the books. They are, in some ways, the team Avila took over in 2015.
“We will deploy the full resource of our organization to ensure we identify the best candidate to lead our baseball operations into the future,” Ilitch said. “This will be an exhaustive, thorough search.”
It will be an overdue search, in the middle of a thoroughly exhausting rebuild.