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If you've listened to 97.1 The Ticket lately, you've likely heard listeners calling for the head of Tigers' Manager Brad Ausmus.
The lowly Tigers are hanging out in last place, seven games out.
But team executives aren't joining the "fire Ausmus" refrain, Lynn Henning writes in The Detroit News:
The Tigers don’t believe their manager is their weak link. His boss, Tigers general manager Al Avila, doesn’t buy it, and neither does Tigers owner Chris Ilitch.
And they’re right.
This year’s Tigers team is roughly where the 1973 and ’74 Tigers were five and six years after Detroit won a World Series in 1968. It’s about at the same spot the ’89 and ’90 Tigers found themselves five and six years after Detroit’s last World Series parade flowed down Woodward Avenue.
The Tigers are dealing with a turnover cycle, which in this case is complicated by the fact so much money and so many guaranteed contracts were spent, and so many draft picks were coughed up, in a full-throttle push to earn late owner Mike Ilitch a World Series trophy he came so close to hugging.
But now the Tigers are dealing with the dark side of their dream. The team is aging. It is a club with a payroll so bloated it’s being taxed for overconsumption. Those contracts and those players are all but impossible to trade.
