Baseball strategy was at the center of the Detroit Tigers’ exit in the ALDS, with fans wondering if Tarik Skubal should have been left in the game. While the Tigers ended the debate with their contract extension for AJ Hinch, the front office is making sure they have a new perspective when it comes to overall philosophy. The only problem is that it led them to a connection that doesn’t exactly give off the right vibes.
The Tigers have hired Alex Smith away from the Chicago Cubs, naming him the team’s new vice president of baseball strategy. Smith had been with the Cubs since 2015, which is impressive, considering the North Siders have had three different managers during that time. A member of the Major League coaching staff, Smith was involved in data analysis and information gathering for the Cubs.
Here is the problem: when the casual baseball fan thinks of “baseball strategy”, someone who worked under Cubs’ president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer shouldn’t be who comes to mind. The Cubs often get the respect of being mentioned in the same class as the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, and New York Mets, but it’s solely based on an outdated perception.
Tigers poach from Cubs’ circle in front office shakeup
Sure, Hoyer was part of the Cubs’ front office that constructed the World Series-winning team in 2016, but the issue is that he wasn’t the mastermind of the operation.
Hoyer was working under his best friend, Theo Epstein, and when Epstein left the Cubs after 2020, Hoyer took over. Since then, the Cubs have only had one season where they made the playoffs, and their defining strategy seems to have been taking a big-market team and turning them into a small-market operation. Case in point: this season, a year where the Cubs, by their definition, had the chips pushed to the middle of the table … and they trimmed their payroll by nearly $30 million.
Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Tigers’ president of baseball operations Scott Harris is also from the Epstein tree and is formerly of the Cubs organization. Suddenly, it makes sense why there is such a large reported gap between the Tigers and Tarik Skubal in current contract talks.
If the Tigers had hired a VP of baseball strategy from, say, the Milwaukee Brewers — the team that has lapped the Cubs in nearly every season since 2018 — then there would be reason to celebrate. Instead, the Tigers appear to be relying on the Cubs’ model, and that shouldn’t be a reason for optimism moving forward.
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