By Jeff Moss
DetroitSportsRag@Gmail.com
November 5, 2013

Mike Ilitch hasn’t been seen by the public in over a year. The owner of the Tigers was not present during his team’s recent postseason run. He didn’t show up on the dais when Jim Leyland abruptly announced his retirement. And he failed to appear Sunday afternoon at Comerica Park to greet his new manager.

Nobody in the media knows if Mr. Ilitch is even alive, residing in an iron lung, or suffering from a debilitating illness, but after the announcement of Brad Ausmus as the manager of his nearly billion-dollar hobby, one thing is for sure ………

He has learned his lesson.

Now, the following is a very flawed analogy for many reasons, but in Mr. I’s mind (or his family’s) the Ilitch Empire was at a crossroads with this recent managerial hire, not unlike Scotty Bowman’s exit after his Red Wings won the 2002 Stanley Cup.

The faulty Bowman/Leyland comparison in Ilitch’s brain is probably why Leyland lasted for eight years in Detroit and why his tenure ended without Little Caesar realizing his lifelong dream of winning a World Series with the Tigers.

When Cancer Stick replaced Alan Trammell in the fall of 2005, Ilitch went out of his way to make the comparison between Scotty and Leyland. Unfortunately, Leyland was like Scotty in the same manner that Dan Quayle was similar to John F. Kennedy.

While Bowman came to Detroit and coached the Red Wings to three Stanley Cup championships, Leyland’s legacy in the Motor City will be this …

An embarrassing 2006 World Series loss to a St. Louis Cardinals team that was clearly inferior.

The failure to follow-up on that success with a playoff berth in 2007.

The utter turmoil he presided over in 2008 when the clubhouse was a mess and his team finished in last place in the American League CENTRAL after entering the season as the World Series favorite.

The 2009 collapse to the Minnesota Twins, which included Miguel Cabrera’s drunken party with members of the Chicago White Sox during a pennant chase at the Townsend and Alfredo Figaro’s asinine start in Game 161.  Do I even need to mention RESTING Placido Polanco in the last week of the season? Or Gerald Laird’s Game 163?

The humiliation in the 2012 World Series against ANOTHER inferior opponent, which included his third base coach potentially costing the team a win in Game 2. We only learned later that Gene Lamont had been dealing with health and EYESIGHT issues all year long.

And finally, Leyland’s pièce de résistance in 2013 — which included, but was not limited to —  his culpability in the David Ortiz and Shane Victorino grand slams.

Scotty Bowman’s legacy in this town will always be three parades down Woodward Avenue. Jim Leyland’s? A 1-8 World Series record, a current seven game losing streak in the Fall Classic, and the waste of hundreds of millions of Ilitch dough. This was Leyland’s big “accomplishment” even though Emaciated Grossness was handed a tremendous payroll advantage in a lousy division that almost guaranteed recent playoff berths.

And while Leyland couldn’t close the deal ONCE with all of those inherent advantages (including multiple Most Valuable Players and Cy Young winners), he still left town being treated like the man who provided Ilitch with multiple rings.

Thankfully, Olympia Entertainment didn’t treat the search for Leyland’s replacement in a manner similar to the post-Bowman process. After Bowman retired in 2002, Ilitch and Ken Holland handed the reigns over to Dave Lewis, one of Scotty’s assistant coaches.

Lewis inherited maybe the best Red Wings roster of the entire era. Not only were the holdovers from the ’97 and ’98 teams still around (Sergei Fedorov, Steve Yzerman, Nick Lidstrom, Brendan Shahanan, etc.), the 2003 squad also featured both Pavel Datsyuk AND Henrik Zetterberg.

That Hall-of-Fame lineup ended up losing in the first round of the playoffs to a Disney creation. In a four-game SWEEP. With Dave Lewis never making one adjustment as his team lost four straight games by one goal.

Dave Lewis was fired a year later and the ONLY potential silver lining from those two nightmarish NHL seasons is that Ilitch was loathe to repeat the Lewis mistake with the Tigers.  This may be why Brad Ausmus is taking over the Tigers and not Lloyd McClendon, Tom Brookens or Gene Lamont.

Which brings us to the new Tigers manager. There are a ton of reasons to be excited about this hire, chief among them being that the new guy isn’t African-American Leyland (Dusty Baker) or Tall Hillbilly Leyland (Charlie Manuel).

Dombrowski could have easily replaced his retiring Tyrannosaurus for a comparable Velociraptor or Brachiosaurus, but he didn’t. In fact, considering how desperate guys like Manuel and Baker were to manage the back-to-back-to-back ALCS participant, Dombrowski  could have probably insisted on those relics keeping Leyland’s entire coaching staff in place.

It would have been the baseball equivalent of “Bewitched” replacing Dick York with Dick Sargeant without ever acknowledging there was a new Darrin.

And considering how conservative that Dombrowski can be, I am a little shocked he didn’t choose the path of least resistance. This is a guy that NEVER makes sudden or risky moves. And if any of the brain-dead imbeciles who are dubious about hiring a man whose only managerial success to date is not ending up like the Israelis during the 1972 Munich Olympics, well, they should consider this …

Imagine if you were playing at a poker table in Atlantic City with Joey Knish. Dude’s been grinding out a living on the felt for three decades. Never makes a reckless move. All of a sudden, this tight-ass pushes all of his chips to the middle of the table.

Are you going to presume that Knish has the nuts or is bluffing at the pot? Dombrowski’s own legacy is on the line with this hire, and because I don’t think Dave suddenly woke up one day and turned into Worm, I am willing to bet that all of the positive things we have heard about Ausmus are accurate.

Ausmus is a guy who, by all accounts, is the direct opposite of Leyland in just about every way possible. The contrast is so drastic that you have to wonder if Dombrowski is more “new school” than he has led us to believe.

If you read the comments made by Dombrowski on Sunday regarding Leyland’s failure to utilize advanced metrics the front office had at its disposal or on Cancer’s bunting philosophy, you’d have to wonder why the hell Dave tried to talk Leyland out of retiring on September 7th in the first place.

I mean, unless the GM was throwing out a bunch of false platitudes to appease the masses, Ralph Fiennes and Brendan Gleeson were confused to why Dombrowski would attempt to convince Leyland to change his mind about retirement.

“Not only have you refused to kill the boy, you even stopped the boy from killing himself, which would’ve solved my problem, which would’ve solved your problem, which sounds like it would’ve solved the boy’s problem.”

And while baseball managing isn’t rocket science, it is nice to know that our current manager probably COULD have been a rocket scientist if he had chosen that vocation. Like, we just gained AT LEAST 40 points in Intelligence Quotient by swapping Ausmus for Leyland and people are wondering if the Dartmouth graduate is up to the task???

Ausmus’ favorite text is something called “A Schopenhauerian Critique of Nietzsche’s Thought” which was written by his father (who by-the-way, isn’t the Jew in the family) while Leyland’s preferred book is “Break the One-Armed Bandits.”

I am as shocked as anyone that I view Brad Ausmus’ return to Detroit as some sort of panacea. If you wanted to summarize the dark ages of Tigers baseball under former General Manager Randy Smith you could probably do so in two words … Brad Ausmus.

The former catcher was the poster boy for Smith’s love affair with making trades with his former team (the San Diego Padres) and a painful reminder of the failure of that horrid regime.

But Ausmus’ return is clearly an end to the flat-earth mentality Leyland espoused while managing the Tigers (I am pretty sure that someone educated at an Ivy League school wouldn’t have chosen Chris Tillman over Hiroki Kuroda for the AL All-Star team simply because Tillman had more WINS).

Not that we know a lot about Ausmus’ baseball philosophies after an embarrassing display by the Detroit sports media on Sunday — even by that group’s pathetic standards — during Brad’s introductory press conference.

Not one of the eunuchs in attendance posed a good question about Ausmus’ thoughts on sample sizes, or bunting strategy or reverse-platoon splits. Instead we had WXYZ’s David Solano asking the prescient question of why Ausmus decided to wear #7.

WDIV’s Jamie Edmunds also had a brilliant inquiry about whether or not any of the current Tigers had sent Ausmus an iMessage congratulating him on the gig. I was kind of pissed the answer was no because I was waiting with bated breath for Edmunds’ probing follow-up asking if said player used an Emjoji in the SMS.

Fox Sports Detroit’s Dana Wakiji asked Ausmus why we wanted to be a manager. It was either that question or what kind of tree do you think you’d be if you were a tree, I guess.

But they were all topped by Mitch Albom’s performance. Frodo actually asked Ausmus if his previous job in San Diego had him in the dugout. It’s kind of weird that a man who has sold as many books as Stephen King and Tom Clancy isn’t familiar with Wikipedia or Google.

Or maybe Condescending Baggins is so far removed from the world of sports with his charity work in Haiti and his death-obsessed novella career that he was clueless to the fact that a Special Assistant to the General Manager would not be part of a baseball team’s COACHING staff.

I mean, would the Hobbit ask an air traffic controller how many hours of cockpit time he had?

I probably shouldn’t be so hard on poor old Mitch. With his duties as a radio talk show host, screenwriter, playwright and columnist describing the evils of new technology — not to mention presiding over that tree house where they bake chocolate chip cookies — he doesn’t have a lot of time to keep up with the game of baseball.

I am not sure how it is possible, but after that press conference I felt I actually knew less about Ausmus than before the questioning. Of course, this is the same press corps that got scooped on Leyland’s retirement by Matt Dery’s radio program producer and then lost the Ausmus exclusive to some dude named Adam Spolane from the Texas Sports Radio Network.

Think about that for a second. Chris Iott. Matthew Mowery. Tom Gage. John Lowe. Jason Beck. These people MAKE A LIVING following the team from city to city for more than half the year and they can’t collectively come up with ONE source to give them the inside information on the machinations of this organization.

After the Tigers lost to the Boston Red Sox in Game 6 of the ALCS, Leyland told the players and organization that he was done. Seriously, just imagine how many people knew that Leyland was retiring on the following Sunday. Not ONE of these losers paid to cover the team could unearth that nugget before Tom FREAKING Mazaway did on Monday morning!!!!!

You know why? They were too busy writing glowing tributes about Leyland (Iott: He once even called to see how my dad was doing!!!!!) — leaving no doubt as to why they never questioned a fucking thing Leyland did — or Tweeting inside jokes to each other.

They all loved them some Leyland. Even though he treated them like shit for the most part. Nastily bullying them when he didn’t like a question. Showing them ZERO respect by spitting food at them during press conferences because he couldn’t wait a few minutes to eat. Throwing media members out of his office and then having his Tigers PR henchman Brian Britten scold them. Walking around the clubhouse in his urine soaked underwear.

Patty Hearst is fucking embarrassed at the Stockholm Syndrome situation that went on in that managerial office between Leyland and the beat writers.

So, yes, I am excited about the new regime. There is no way someone as analytical as Ausmus appears to be isn’t going to manage from a “new school” approach.

And while having a manager with a brain won’t guarantee a World Series title, it sure as fuck won’t hurt. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Ausmus manages here eight seasons, doesn’t win a title, leaves the job getting fellated by all of the media members in Detroit and only gets to ride down Woodward during the THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE as the Grand Marshal and not because his team won it all?

Sound familiar?

It is hilarious that the same Leyland defenders and apologists are claiming this is such a high-risk maneuver. Next season is the 30th anniversary of the last World Series title in Detroit. And while I didn’t attend Dartmouth, by my math, that means LEYLAND NEVER WON HERE!!!!

And while that isn’t being held against Cancer Stick, we get the following from Frodo Baggins:

“What he does have to do is win. Fast. With an expensive lineup containing Cy Young and MVP winners, and burning expectations of a championship, there is no learning curve in Detroit.”

Ausmus has to win fast. But the guy who just spent the last eight years failing to do so? Let me write his Hall of Fame introduction and host an appreciation day for him at the Fox Theater.

Look, I am sure that I will not agree with every single move Ausmus makes. There might even be times that I want to go on one of his daughter’s Facebook pages and yell at them for a perceived idiotic move by their dad.

But I am fairly confident that I will always understand the THOUGHT PROCESS behind the new guy’s decisions. And I am quite sure that Ausmus won’t be managing from his “gut” mainly because, as my sister and wife have pointed out … HE DOESN’T HAVE A GUT.

Now, if in six months Ausmus is bringing in Phil Coke to face a righty because of some tingling sensation in his six-pack abs we will have a huge problem.

But I am making an educated guess that the guy the Sporting News named their ninth SMARTEST athlete in sports back in 2010 is going to add about five years to my life expectancy.

Whatever the case may be, our long national local nightmare is over.

Smoke ’em if you got ’em.