AJ Hinch is under heavy fire for egregious Keider Montero decision in Tigers loss

Keider Montero has been a quiet revelation for the Tigers' rotation this season. Although it's hard to give the front office credit for anything right now, they made the right call with Montero when they demoted him to Triple-A out of spring training. There wasn't room for him in the rotation at the time, but they still believed in him as a starter and wanted to keep him in his routine instead of moving him to the bullpen.

Although he'd gotten hit around a bit in his last few starts entering Sunday, he shook it off and pitched like a monster against the White Sox, trying to help the Tigers avoid another sweep.

He got through six innings of scoreless, two-hit baseball on just 65 pitches. The offense had only mustered up a single run of support, but Montero was still giving them their best chance of winning. Detroit's bullpen is ... untrustworthy, to put it mildly — and flat-out horrific, to put it meanly.

Montero has already pitched a complete game shutout once in his still young career — and he did it on 96 pitches. He looked primed to do something similar on Sunday.

But instead of letting him ride, AJ Hinch pulled him ahead of the seventh. Drew Anderson came in and almost immediately gave up a game-tying homer, then a game-winning RBI single.

Montero wasn't hurt. He told reporters after the game that he "felt really good," but it was Hinch's decision.

And Tigers fans were rightfully livid.

AJ Hinch's decision to pull Keider Montero in the middle of a dominant start has Tigers fans calling for his head

The Tigers are sitting with the kind of record — 22-38 (.367), tied with the Rockies for the worst in baseball — that inevitably leads to fans playing the blame game. Hinch's Montero decision kickstarted that kind of discourse with a vengeance.

Pulling Montero was undoubtedly a poor choice on Hinch's part, but discontent was brewing long before Sunday. What were once viewed as savvy, data-based matchup maneuverings have soured in the eyes of Tigers fans as Detroit keeps sinking into unthinkable depths.

But it's not Hinch's fault that none of the options to take over behind Montero were trustworthy — that's on Scott Harris and the front office. Anderson had been solid through May even when the rest of the roster was floundering, but at the end of the day, he is still a mostly unproven KBO import that Harris signed at a bargain. The offense has not made the internal improvements Harris vowed they would.

There will be someone else to blame again tomorrow, and then the day after that and so on, until things inevitably come all the way back around to Hinch. But the truth of it is that everyone deserves their share of the blame right now; Hinch just happened to put himself in the line of fire on Sunday.

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