Does Al Avila hold all of the blame for the Tigers’ terrible start?
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Al Avila is Ruining the Tigers
Dylan Bair: Generally whenever there are teams that have this, that has this much ineptitude people throw strays at everybody. It’s the players fault. The star who’s not leading correctly. It’s the coach or the manager. Maybe the front office. It’s the owner. Everybody universally is pretty much in the same agreement that Al Avila is the sole problem.
All the moves that he has either made or in my opinion, just not made the former one is the one that to me is just, will still forever bother me because the Yankees were willing to give a mint for him. They were going to give you so much for him and then he immediately gets injured and then just falls off a cliff.
And now he’s a glorified set-up guy, maybe a closer at best. That’s really sad considering where he was when he started his career. Then you have all of the ineptitude with the offense. You have guys like Jeimer Candelario who are not pulling their end of the bargain on the offensive side of the ball.
And you just have a team that’s hapless, that’s lost, especially with the Minnesota Twins bouncing back. And the other thing too, and we’ll get to this more later, but my team has had the worst injury struggles possible. It’s not like the Tigers have had that many issues on the injury side of things. And so your entire reason for being as bad as you are, is because this roster was constructed so poorly and that’s all. And the GM is the only person that you can blame for that.
Paul Rochon: And honestly the worst part of all of it is most fans have been okay with the moves that have been made the last couple of years. The problem is, Al Avila shouldn’t really get a lot of credit for them. So if you look at the draft picks, you look at Casey Mize, you look at Spencer Torkelson, he pick the best players that fell into his lap, right?
You don’t get credit for hitting your top three picks. That’s the bare minimum. Like you can’t mess those up. You don’t get credit for them. Then you look at A.J. Hinch. You say, you know what? He went out and he went and got the best manager in baseball. Let’s look at how that happened.
The only reason he was no longer coaching the Houston Astros that he won a world series with, is because of scandal, the cheating scandal. Now, whether you want to get into that or not, it doesn’t really matter. He ended up losing his job as part of the fallout from that and actually was interested in coming to Detroit and taking us on the upswing of the rebuild.
So does Al Avila get credit for doing the obvious? Yes, he didn’t bungle the higher when you have a chance to swift away one of the best managers in baseball. But again, it falls into your lap. All of the moves, when you’re trading guys like Justin Verlander.
Look at what Justin Verlander has done with the Astros since he’s gone there. And you get nothing relevant in return for that. He goes out, he wins a Cy Young, he’s kind of sub-two ERA, like it’s really should have won two Cy Youngs.
Dylan Bair: And he’s well on his way to challenging for another one.
Paul Rochon: Another, if he keeps up this pace, he’s been absent. Eight shutout innings the other night. One hit and we got nothing. We got nothing. It falls on one guy’s shoulders and people get frustrated. They want to say, oh, Chris isn’t like his dad and he’s not going to spend the same, whatever. We don’t really have evidence that if we’re ready to contend, that Chris won’t spend. People have this idea, but clearly, we are not near contention right now.
Dylan Bair: What would it look like if you had this guy and an open checkbook too?
Paul Rochon: But that’s the thing, you can’t say. Oh, if we had signed Correa, we’d be in playoff contention. We’d have a half more run a game, maybe? It’s not like Correa has lit the world on fire anyway. What’s he going to add to how paltry this lineup has been?
As you said, where united here. There’s really one guy to blame, but it’s frustrating because this was the first time in almost a decade that the Tigers had actual expectations, not to win a world series, not to contend, but to be worth watching. If you guys watched the Detroit Sports Nation shows, you guys know Ryan Griffin, he’s one of our good colleagues and friends.
He’s not a big baseball guy but he is probably watching more baseball this year than ever in his life. Every single game for the first several games, because he was excited about what Detroit was building and the prospects that we had. And now he is almost completely turned off from this sport because we’re terrible.
He devoted so much time to watch this terrible TV. It’s depressing.
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