WBy Jeff Moss
DetroitSportsRag@GMail.com
July 13, 2016
So a couple weeks ago I was reading the Detroit Free Press and noticed an article by Brian Manzullo and George Sipple about the Detroit Tigers selling Jim Leyland’s old couch that had remained in Brad Ausmus’ office since Smokes McGee retired at the end of 2013.
(I’m not sure why it took TWO reporters to cover this story about the Tigers selling a gross, dusty, cigarette-smoke-laden sofa bed. This wasn’t exactly the freaking Watergate break-in.)
Instead of rehashing the entire thing, here is the Woodward and Bernstein of Gardner-White furnishings giving the Craig’s List backstory …
I found it quite odd that after 2 1/2 years, Brad Ausmus finally wanted this filthy piece of furniture out of his office considering he is probably just months away from being permanently removed himself.
But I figured this was a piece of memorabilia the DSR had to get its hands on, so I emailed Ashley Baughman and told her we were interested in the ugly corduroy sofa. I didn’t hide the fact that I was representing this site. The email address I used was DetroitSportsRag@GMail.com. Not very clandestine.
Anyway, much to my surprise, I received an email back from Baughman saying it was mine if I came up with the dough and could get the sofa out of the stadium.
Now, why did I want this disgusting relic that probably wouldn’t have been picked up by scavengers if left on a curb with the garbage? Well, I thought it would be pretty fun to get a blacklight and see what kind of gross particles remained on the fabric.
Also, I figured we could have a friendly get-together at the Podcast Detroit studios after an upcoming broadcast, take hatchets, axes and chainsaws to the sleeper and experience some catharsis after the frustration of these last 10.5 seasons.
(You can click on the below Periscope links to watch us pick up the sofa and then inspect it once we got it to the studio.)
LIVE on #Periscope: Purchasing Jim Leyland’s sofa live from Comerica Park https://t.co/47FuOEeCKf
— Jeff Moss (@JeffMossDSR) July 12, 2016
LIVE on #Periscope: Jim Leyland’s sofa arrives at the Podcast Detroit studios. https://t.co/rIlCC2Q8uA
— Jeff Moss (@JeffMossDSR) July 12, 2016
I don’t know about you, but swinging an axe into this grimy furniture piece while reminiscing about Don Kelly batting third or Torii Hunter sacrifice bunting with Miguel Cabrera in the on-deck circle or Leyland babying Max Scherzer during the 2013 ALCS might be liberating.
And you might think that dishing out $1,060 (including sales tax) on a sofa that you plan to destroy would be an expensive method to release stress, but compared to Mike Ilitch spending over a billion dollars on payroll in the last decade to go 1-8 in World Series games, well …. it seems pretty cheap in comparison.
So we picked up the couch yesterday afternoon from the ramp underneath the fountain in centerfield and transported it to our studio.
Shockingly, the Tigers didn’t clean the thing up at all. They didn’t bring in Hagopian to steam clean it. They didn’t even have the cleaning crew vacuum it. The thing had a cloud of dirt surrounding it not unlike Pig-Pen from the “Peanuts” cartoon.
Once the couch was in our possession, I contacted the crusty old manager’s son, Patrick Leyland, and alerted him that we now owned his dad’s old sleeper. The former Tigers farmhand had a pretty good sense of humor about the whole thing ….
The most interesting part of this entire ordeal occurred when I Tweeted out this picture from the administrative offices of the Tigers ….
You might remember a couple of years back when I was barred from entering the season-ending David Dombrowski press conference because the team’s director of media relations Kate Ready didn’t believe that I actually worked for the Detroit Jewish News.
Well, she was actually right about that, but it was pretty mean to ban me from the presser just because I left my credential at a Yom Kippur dinner.
Anyway, two months after preventing me from asking Dombrowski questions regarding the failure of a season that ended in a three-game sweep at the hands of the Baltimore Orioles in the ALDS, Ready made news herself.
Ready idiotically Tweeted out that she hoped that none of her tax money was going to pay the $48-million contract the University of Michigan had just handed Jim Harbaugh to coach the Wolverines. Ya know, because U of M is a public institution.
I say idiotically because not only wasn’t any of Harbaugh’s cash going to come out of taxpayer funds, Ready was working for an organization that was in the process of building a hockey arena with nearly $285 million of PUBLIC INVESTMENT!!!!!!
This woman who was in charge of PUBLIC RELATIONS actually walked into THAT minefield. Her unforced error eventually got picked up by Deadline Detroit and other local media outlets.
The story went away pretty quickly and I hadn’t really given much thought to what happened to Ready until I was reached by a member of the Ilitch organization yesterday regarding that above Tweet.
I was told by my source that Ready was LET GO quietly by the Ilitch family less than ONE MONTH after her blunder that the DSR originally uncovered. Why? Because the optics of an Olympia Entertainment employee pissing on taxpayer funds going to a sports entity when Ilitch’s “The District” was still a touchy subject amongst the public was just too stupid for them to overlook.
In fact, her removal was so hush-hush that most employees didn’t even know Ready was gone until a Tigers press release went out with someone else’s name on it.
Fortunately for Kate, she quickly landed on her feet with a gig at MLB as a “New Media Strategist.” Maybe she is in charge of explaining to the baseball world just how easy it is to stick your foot in your mouth with one Tweet.
So, we plan on destroying the Leyland sleeper sofa next Tuesday night after we test it for a variety of stains using the blacklight. If you can’t make it in person to help hatchet the thing up, the video will be available via Periscope.
And I am still waiting for Sipple and Manzullo’s follow-up story in the Freep regarding the eventual purchaser of Leyland’s makeshift bed.
I am not holding my breath that the article will ever be written, let alone see the light of day.