This signing doesn't surprise me with the Tigers backwards/sideways thinking front office.
All we have heard is they are going heavy into sabermetrics and analytics, yet they hire an old and old school manager with Gardenhire.
If they really wanted to move forward and into the 21st century, they would have gone after one of the forward thinking managers to be who use everything available in that type of data, and whether or not that prospective guy had any managerial experience majors or minors. Experience or not the next few years the Tigers are not going to contend, and could have had a saber guy to use all they had and/or offer suggestions to the Tigers analytical team.
Just speculating here, but wouldnot be surprised if Leyland had anything to do with this, you know giving his approval of him.
Avila going to everyone asking their approval of his choice, because he is in over his head, and Chris Ilitch told him to get a safe choice and yes man to front office.
http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12331388/the-great-analytics-rankings
THE GREAT ANALYTICS RANKINGS
ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com unleashed our experts and an army of researchers to rate 122 teams on the strength of each franchise's analytics staff, its buy-in from execs and coaches, its investment in biometric data and how much its approach is predicated on analytics. After looking at the stats, reaching out to every team and dozens of informed sources and evaluating each front office, we ranked an overall top 10 and bottom 10 and placed each team in one of five tiers by sport.
