Detroit Tigers: Is Manager Brad Ausmus to blame for 2015’s failures?
With news breaking the last two days that David Price and others were on the move, the Detroit Tigers basically waved the white flag on the remainder of the 2015 season. While many fans this morning aren’t “excited” about these moves from a win-now standpoint, they were necessary and needed for a franchise that is lacking talent in their farm system top to bottom.
On the heels of four straight AL Central Crowns, this was not the year that everyone had expected, and missing the playoffs certainly was not on the radar on opening day. So the big question that needs to be answered, what went wrong?
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Over the past couple of weeks the whispers started to get a little more audible, is Brad Ausmus the wrong man for the job? Does he play it too safe and cost this team games? Are people actually wishing that Jim Leyland was still smoking cigarettes in the dugout?
Ausmus was 90-72 in his debut season and seemed to be well liked by his players and by the Detroit fan base. It’s an old adage in professional sports that when a team under performs, the finger is typically pointed at the manager/coach. After only a season and a half at the helm, it seems that people have started to sour on Ausmus as the manager.
I won’t say that I have agreed with every move that this man made this season. Is there room for improvement? Most definitely. Is he solely responsible for the lackluster effort and poor results that led to yesterday’s selling of assets? I think you would be a fool to place the blame solely on the manager as issues with this team bubbled to the surface. If Ausmus isn’t the only problem, then what else was broken?
It should come as no surprise that their bullpen is one of the worst in Major League Baseball. This is nothing new and is not a problem that just became evident this year.
Gone are the days of Papa Grande, Todd “Meatball” Jones, and Joe Nathan, but the Tigers inserted Joba Chamberlain and Joakim Soria and got similar results. Chamberlain is done and gone, that experiment was a failure. Soria had some decent moments this season before being moved yesterday.
Despite it being glaringly obvious that this was a major flaw, the players brought in to fix the problem were, for the most part, cast offs. This bullpen cost them games the last couple years, it cost them games this year, it will continue to cost them games moving forward unless the problem is addressed.
The bullpen problem is made worse by a starting pitching rotation that pales in comparison to previous seasons. Max Scherzer is obviously one of the best pitchers in the game, but he took big dollars elsewhere much like David Price will when this season ends.
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Trying to fill Scherzer’s innings with Alfredo Simon, Shane Greene, and Kyle Lobstein put the Tigers in a hole.
Losing Scherzer plus the injury to Justin Verlander turned this rotation from one of the best in the league to somewhere below average. Pair that with a bad bullpen and we had a recipe for disaster.
Is Brad Ausmus the right guy for the job? That remains to be seen as the rebooting process is now in full effect.
There were enough problems with this team going into this season that you can’t place blame on Ausmus. He is still a young manager who needs to continue to grow in his role as this team retools. The core foundation is going to stay intact and features a ton of talent.
Give Ausmus a new fleet of arms out of the bullpen, develop a couple of the newly acquired young starters, and see how the next couple of seasons play out. It will be difficult, but one can hope this rebuilding effort will resemble that of the Boston Red Sox from two seasons ago: a quick turnaround that led to a World Series victory.
Tigers fans need to sit back and let this group rebuild into a championship level club. I am confident that Ausmus can be the guy calling the shots when that day comes.
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