Detroit Tigers: Brad Ausmus’ Future as Manager Appears Uncertain
By Matt Snyder
Al Avila, newly minted general manager of the Detroit Tigers, appeared on MLB Network’s “High Heat” yesterday with the ever-yelling Chris Russo. The discussion included talk of Avila taking over for Dombrwoski, the interesting situation of having his son on the team, and building a winning club for 2016.
But the most interesting bit — at least as far as the 2015 season is concerned — had to do with manager Brad Ausmus and his future with the organization. Matthew Mowery brought this to our attention with a pair of tweets on the interaction.
Al Avila asked on @MLBNetwork if remaining games are important for Brad Ausmus with respect to offseason evaluation: "I would say so, yes."
— Matthew B. Mowery (@matthewbmowery) August 26, 2015
Avila did explain, again, though that the way the situation will be handled will be an offseason evaluation. (Which will include everyone)
— Matthew B. Mowery (@matthewbmowery) August 26, 2015
Avila provided a nuanced response — hinting that he wants to hold end-of-season evaluations of the entire staff — but he certainly didn’t provide a full-blown endorsement of Ausmus as the future manager of the club. It would be easy for a GM to take the cop-out answer of “Brad Ausmus is our manager”, but Avila didn’t go down that road.
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He obviously didn’t indicate that Ausmus would certainly be gone, but by taking the wait-and-see approach, he is definitely leaving the door open for an offseason managerial change.
Ausmus was certainly thrust into a difficult situation with a horrendous bullpen situation, but he’s done very little to show himself as a forward-thinking manager. At his best he simply stays out of the way and let’s the team play, but at his worst he has made questionable bullpen moves or run his team into extra outs on the bases with faux aggressive attitude.
An ideal manager would be one who would seem to look at the chessboard and anticipate events two or three moves in advance. Ausmus seems to be in reactionary mode far too often, waiting for a situation to come before he thinks of a way to get out of it. We’ll have to see what the future holds.
Here’s the full video of the interview between Russo and Avila. The nine-minute video has several interesting tidbits for Tigers fans.
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