Detroit Tigers: ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel lays the groundwork for Scott Harris

It’s time for action with the Detroit Tigers’ future.

The Detroit Tigers have turned a page and officially began a new era. After hiring and introducing Scott Harris as the team’s new president of baseball operations, it’s time for him to get to work. For him, that means starting to employ the three concepts he spoke about during his presser.

Many people have opinions about what comes next for the Detroit Tigers’ future. ESPN MLB Insider Kiley McDaniel penned his ideas for what Scott Harris needs to do next. McDaniel’s exclusive article on ESPN+ talked about the next four steps Harris needs to take in his new role with Detroit.

McDaniel lays the groundwork for what the Tigers need to do and explains the way the Tigers can get through to the other side and find the light at the end of the tunnel. While I’m not going to sit here and detail each step McDaniel lists, they coincide with Harris’s three concepts very closely.

This leads me to think that McDaniel feels Harris’s concepts are the right way to go about it on the surface level. Plenty of things need to happen, and it’s going to start this offseason with a purge of the team’s roster.

Can Scott Harris build a new brand of Detroit Tigers baseball?

One of the things that Scott Harris mentioned during his press conference was that he wants one of his three tenants to be the ability to develop a culture that drives players to want to come to Detroit to get better.

Harris wants Detroit to be a destination that leaves players coming here to get better. For McDaniel, the thing that stuck out to me is what he wrote about building a point of view. Taking it a step further, he talks about specific teams and their goals for prospects.

Whether its a team like the Cleveland Guardians, who are trying to develop top collegiate arms into big leaguers, as McDaniel mentions or the Los Angeles Dodgers, who prioritize teaching their up-and-coming hitters to be able to lift the ball and tap into some power that they may not be using. (Both examples were mentioned directly by McDaniel in the ESPN+ article linked above.)

As Harris mentioned, he wants the Tigers to be able to succeed in doing this. But, as he noted, when it comes to his past mentor Farhan Zaidi, he told Harris that you have to be different. Copying other teams will not work; being unique is the route to go.

After all, Ilitch referred to Harris as being innovative and felt he will bring a new and creative mindset to the Tigers organization. Changes are coming, and Harris needs time to get settled in and start instilling his core concepts and defining the new brand of Tigers baseball.

So as McDaniel mentions in his piece, Harris will find the Tigers’ niche. He will help build and define what it means to play for the Detroit Tigers. The new brand of Tigers baseball is going to take time, but Harris is in the driver’s seat to determine what that will be.