Tigers' Dearth Of Young Talent A Generation In The Making

Billy Martin was one of the first to complain about it, and while he was right, his bosses didn't appreciate their dirty laundry being aired before the baseball nation. But that was Billy, of course.

"The [Baltimore] Orioles have all the good, young players," Billy said in the summer of '73. The Orioles, back then, were the team against whom the rest of the American League was measured. They had a lethal combination of clutch hitting, pitching, defense, and always the youngsters moving in to supplant the veterans. The infusion of youth was not lost on Martin - which was sort of ironic because Billy Martin was one of the best managers in his time at coaxing and prodding veteran players, somehow getting them to perform above their apparent capabilities. It worked in 1972, when the aging Tigers nipped the pack to win the American League East Division on the season's final weekend. But it was failing in '73, and Billy pointed squarely at the Orioles and their blend of veterans and younger players to underscore the Tigers' seeming deficiency in producing homegrown talent.

To say that rankled General Manager Jim Campbell would be like saying the Atlantic Ocean is slightly damp.

Martin's popping off about the Tigers' anemic minor league system was a contributing factor to his being fired in August 1973, but he was a soothsayer, because the team's inability to replace their 1968 World Series heroes with anything worth shouting about led the Tigers into some pretty bleak, winning-challenged baseball years from 1974-77. Billy told it like it was - even if the brass didn't want anyone else to hear about it. But we all found out soon enough.

The drafting got better and the development improved in the mid-70's, and that paid off with the core of players that won the 1984 World Series: Jack Morris; Lance Parrish; Sweet Lou Whitaker; Alan Trammell; Dan Petry, and Tommy Brookens were all products of the Tigers' minor league system.

But then the well ran dry again, and it has remained mostly parched since the mid-1980's.

One year, Sparky Anderson, perhaps bored in his sixth full season as Tigers manager, pointed to an unknown young infielder and said the kid was so good, gosh darn it, that Whitaker would have to move to third base just to get the youngster into the lineup as the new second baseman.

The kid who would force All-Star Lou Whitaker to learn a brand new position was someone named Chris Pittaro. It was 1985, the Tigers about to defend their championship. And Sparky would have us believe Pittaro was the best thing since....Lou Whitaker.

He wasn't.

A few years after that, Sparky tried to sell us on a lefthanded-hitting outfielder who had modestly impressed in a late-season call-up the previous September.

"Torey Lovullo can do it all," Sparky essentially said.

No, he couldn't. Ten hits in 87 at-bats in 1989 proved that quite nicely.

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How a major league baseball team can employ dozens of scouts, a peck of minor league instructors and a bushel of general managers for nearly 20 years and not produce one player that can even be remotely considered a Rookie of the Year candidate is astonishing...
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Other teams were producing young players throughout the 1990's, and if you want a big reason why winning baseball hasn't been seen here since 1993, and only twice since 1988, you can place a big fat check mark next to this: Failure to draft big league-caliber ballplayers.

There was a pitcher named Ricky Greene that was supposed to be all that in the early '90's. Uh-uh. There was a tall, supposedly intimidating switch-hitting first baseman named Tony Clark that was going to make folks go crazy in this town. After several years of unrealized potential, the folks went crazy, alright. Right to the funny farm - which would be an apt name for the Tigers' minor league system during the 1990's.

A little bit into that decade, the team was high on a catcher named Rich Rowland. For several years we kept hearing about this Rowland and how he was going to make people forget Lance Parrish. But if people watched Rich Rowland play in the big leagues and forgot about Lance Parrish, then it was due to some medication-induced blackout. Eventually Rowland was shipped off to the Red Sox, where his career died its expected death forthwith.

Then we all wanted to believe in a righthanded starter named Nate Cornejo. Oh, did we want to believe. By the time Cornejo entered the big league picture in 2001, the Tigers had run through top draft picks and "promising" young players like grease rags for ten years. But that was all to change when Cornejo started taking the ball every fifth day, we were assured by then-GM Randy Smith, a snake oil salesman if there ever was one.

In four trials with the Tigers, Cornejo's ERAs read like stock prices of a fledgling corporation: 7.38; 5.04; 4.67; 8.42.

And, speaking of the stock market, the Tigers did the usual thing with Cornejo that they did with all their supposed promising players: They bought high, and sold low.


Pittaro (left) and Lovullo: No sale, Sparky!

Clark (left) and Cornejo: Yeah....RIGHT

Other kids have been anointed baseball emperors by Tigers management over the past 15-20 years, but mostly they've been sans clothes. Certainly they've been devoid of big league talent.

How a major league baseball team can employ dozens of scouts, a peck of minor league instructors and a bushel of general managers for nearly 20 years and not produce one player that can even be remotely considered a Rookie of the Year candidate is astonishing, and would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

But now we're in 2006, and it looks like there may finally be some peach fuzz that could materialize into major league whiskers.

Joel Zumaya and Justin Verlander are two righthanded pitchers who made the team's 25-man roster out of spring training, and by all accounts these kids are the real deal, because baseball people whose zip codes do not begin with "48" say so. In other words, other teams are actually coveting Zumaya - a reliever - and Verlander - a starter - and wishing they were on their rosters. How easy it is to be impressed around here!

Zumaya throws in the mid-to-high 90's, and is said to have a nasty little breaking pitch. Verlander is a tall drink of water whose "stuff" is of excellent big league caliber already, those in the know report. They are labeled, together, as "can't miss" prospects. There is talk of All-Star appearances and more for these youngsters down the line. It's all just a matter of time.

Time shouldn't be much of a factor for us. What's another year or two, when you've waited 20?