Not firing Al Avila sooner
The Detroit Tigers have a new president of baseball operations in Scott Harris, who seems very qualified and forward-thinking. But before that, they had the worst GM in the league for the last seven years.
Al Avila should not have been able to sniff the 2022 MLB Draft or the trade deadline. If Chris Ilitch was going to fire him, I don’t know why he was allowed to conduct either of those trains.
Now, one might say that leaving either of those things to an interim GM (likely Sam Menzin) wouldn’t be a very wise decision either, and that would be correct. But Avila had a proven track record of being a terrible talent evaluator and awful at trades. An interim GM couldn’t have done any worse.
At no point this season did the Tigers look like they were figuring things out. In fact, things only got worse. Seven years worth of bad trades, drafts, and free agent signings finally caught up to Avila.
The Detroit Tigers made a lot of bad decisions this year—and I mean a lot. But keeping Al Avila around for as long as they did has to be the worst of them all.