So you are completely satisfied with Ausmus as the manager?
And how do you explain that most all the Tigers are under-performing? Bad luck?
Personally, I never bought into the hype for this team and most of the recent acquisitions. I do not fault Ausmus for that, that is on the GM/GMs. And some of the performance issues can be traced to the Hitting and/or Pitching coaches. It also is a reflection of the organizational philosophies (i.e. Aggressive hitting).
Sometimes a dramatic move wakes the players up. I think they believe they can just play there way out of what is going on. I don't think they can, without somehow being held accountable. Ausmus getting fired might actually do that. Managers have been fired for far worse.
And now that Freddie Gonzalez is available...
Satisfied with Ausmus? I guess so, as long as he doesn't lose the clubhouse and follows basic strategy I'm ok with him.
There are a ton of reasons why this team is underperforming, mainly the fact that we have one starting pitcher who's performing well and he's ahead of his career averages, the other 4/5 of the rotation has been awful. That's the most glaring weakness the team has. I don't hear a lot of people clamoring for Rick Dubee to be fired though.
The offense has it's own problems, there are two hitters that are greatly exceeding expectations in Castellanos and Victor Martinez, you could throw Kinsler in there to a lesser extent. The rest of the lineup is either underperforming (JD, Miggy, Upton) or downright awful to begin with but worse than expected (Iglesias, McCan't, Gose). The team is 13th in the majors in runs scored, not terrible but to win with the pitching we have they need to be closer to top 5.
The bullpen has been a bit of a mess but i blame the starters for that, if the starters routinely go 6+ the bullpen will be fine. As the starters go, so goes the bullpen for the most part.
My point about Ausmus is that he really doesn't matter, I think so much of the talk on this board and sports radio being dedicated to him is pointless. He isn't the worlds best but that's hard to quantify. He's really the least of the tigers problems but he's what's on everyone's mind, it was the same with Leyland for a while, there was also a fascination with the last guy on the roster like Inge, Raburn, Kelly, etc. I don't know if it's just Tigers fans but we seem to have a laser focus on the insignificant problems.
If you're advocating making a change for the sake of change, ok, whatever. I don't think it will make any significant change in this teams performance. they may play better after he's fired, they likely will but I think that's a result of players returning to their historical averages. To think that a batter pitcher matchup is going to greatly change because of who's in the dugout is naive at best, I actually expect more from you Rebbiv since you're great with tangible matters. Any real improvement after Ausmus will be a more of a correlation vs causation IMO.