The Detroit Tigers are counting down the days until they're finally out from under the six-year, $140 million deal they handed to shortstop Javier Baez in the winter of 2021. To say that the former Chicago Cubs star has failed to live up to that salary would be an understatement: Baez has been unplayably bad at times over the last few years in Detroit, hitting .221/.262/.347 with almost as many strikeouts (341) as games played (360).
And you don't even really need the benefit of hindsight to say that the Baez contract was a horrible idea. It was built on the back of a torrid stretch run with the New York Mets that was out of character with the rest of his career, and he figured to only get worse as a defender and les disciplined as a hitter as he aged into his 30s. Sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
Yet despite all of that evidence, both past and present, the guy who actually negotiated the contract is still trying to wriggle his way off the hook. Unsurprisingly, Tigers fans shouldn't buy it — if anything, they should be even angrier.
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Al Avila's excuses only make Tigers' Javy Baez signing more baffling
Avila served as Tigers GM from 2015 until his firing midway through the 2022 season, a period that saw the slow but steady dismantling of everything that Dave Dombrowski had worked to build. The Baez deal was the nadir, and one that Avila apparently knew was dangerous even before he offered it.
"We knew the swing and miss was there ... and we knew that, even my analyst was telling me, there's regression there," Avila said in an appearance on the Detroit News Tigers Today podcast.
Setting aside the reference to one singular "analyst" in the year of our lord 2021, it's infuriating to know that Avila knew all of Baez's warts and decided to invest anyway. And then he tries to have his cake and eat it too, saying that "nobody could've predicted falling off a cliff the way he did".
In fact, lots of people could and did predict just that. Baez's game was always one that figured to age poorly, predicated on elite athleticism to help him excel at shortstop and make up for terrible plate discipline. The moment those skills started to go, the bottom fell out, because Baez didn't have the other skills to fall back on.
"We felt there was going to be some regression, but never expected for him to fall off that far," Avila added.
If there's a silver lining here, it's that Avila is no longer running things in Detroit, and Scott Harris doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would fall for this gambit. The next time Tigers fans (understandably) bemoan his inaction in free agency, just remember that it could always be worse.