Published April 3, 2023

Believe it or not, it’s been more than six years since Mr. I, Mike Ilitch, passed away. A titan in sports ownership, Ilitch resurrected the Red Wings from the brink and brought the Stanley Cup back to Detroit not once, not twice, but four times between 1997-2008.

For that, a town is grateful.

But it’s time to stop romanticizing his ownership of the Tigers.

As I peruse that “pulse of the sports fan,” Twitter, one thing is abundantly clear. Apparently a bulk of Tigers faithful believe that Mike Ilitch bought the Tigers in 2006.

It’s like what Debbie Reynolds said to Albert Brooks in the film, Mother.

“Why do children think their mother just came to life when they were born? I had a whole life before you.”

So why do so many Tigers fans think the Ilitch family ownership started when the team became competitive—for a time—in 2006?

They seem to conveniently whitewash the 14 preceding years.

In case you need reminding, Mike Ilitch purchased the Tigers in the summer of 1992 from fellow pizza baron Tom Monaghan.

What followed was more than a decade of bad hires, slapstick baseball and horrific drafting of amateur players.

Yet all you see is the comparison between Mr. I and his son, current owner Chris Ilitch.

Chris Ilitch doesn’t have the same passion for baseball as his dad!

Mike Ilitch would never let this happen on his watch!

Part of this is rooted in crankiness. I get it. In a town up to its eyeballs in sports rebuilds, the Tigers’ malfeasance since they were relevant in 2016 is causing some folks to think with their heart more than their brain.

Still, the record needs to be set straight. The statute of limitations in talking ill of Mike Ilitch has passed. It’s not too soon any longer.

Since Mike Ilitch and Tom Monaghan shook hands on the deal some 31 years ago, the Tigers have authored not only some bad seasons, but historically bad ones. The overall body of work has been awful, quite frankly.

Here’s a quick refresher course of some of the baseball foisted on the fans in Ilitch’s first decade of ownership.

1996: 53-109. 2001: 66-96. 2002: 55-106. 2003: 43-119.

These years were punctuated by a revolving door in the GM office (Joe Klein, Joe McDonald, Jerry Walker—then the Randy Smith travesty). The Tigers burned through managers as well (Sparky Anderson, who became mystified by Ilitch and retired sooner than he would have liked; Buddy Bell, Larry Parrish, Phil Garner, Luis Pujols, Alan Trammell). The draft picks—often in the top five because the team was so lousy—read like a roster of cautionary tales and busts.

Even Tiger Stadium itself wasn’t immune to Ilitch.

In its last years, the old ballpark was largely neglected and allowed to wither away. Why? Because Ilitch was dead set on building a new baseball palace. The hiring of team president John McHale Jr. in the mid-1990s was done for expressly that reason. They may as well have called McHale the President of New Ballparks, because that was pretty much his sole responsibility—to get the Tigers out of Tiger Stadium and into what became known as Comerica Park, which opened to tepid reviews in 2000.

It wasn’t that Ilitch didn’t care about the Tigers. It’s just that he found success in baseball to be more elusive than in hockey. Not until Ilitch hired David Dombrowski in fall 2001 did the barge slowly start to turn around. Dombrowski was Ilitch’s baseball version of Jimmy Devellano and Kenny Holland, except that Ilitch hit the bull’s eye with Jimmy D, the owner’s first Red Wings hire in 1982. It took nine years to find DD.

Speaking of which, while Rome was burning at Michigan and Trumbull, the Red Wings were doing fine down at Joe Louis Arena. Winning hockey was the norm, starting right about when Ilitch bought the baseball team, culminating in the Red Wings ending their 42-year Stanley Cup drought in 1997.

So the baseball tomfoolery was almost accepted as a new owner trying to find his way—which Ilitch was.

But let’s not, in 2023, pretend like Mike Ilitch is a baseball god who did no wrong.

For the record, I share the skepticism about Chris Ilitch. It’s no crime for some genes to not get passed down. It’s also not fair to compare father and son, in any endeavor. But I get why the fans think that Little I doesn’t have the same drive or passion about baseball as his dad did. But you’re talking about a man (Mr. I) who literally played the game and had aspirations of being a Tiger. It’s hard to compete with that!

It’s fair to wonder if Chris Ilitch has “it” in him.

Still, the Tigers franchise, under the Ilitch family, has mostly been a disaster. There have been four 100+ loss seasons (including two of 114+), several more of 90+ losses and except for a relatively brief stretch of competitiveness (2006-14), the baseball has been pretty awful. Yes, Mr. I mitigated some of the losing by whipping out his checkbook back in the day, but while he was buying big name players and trading for them, the player development remained a disaster. In fact, Homegrown Tigers Who Have Made it Big Since 1970, would be among the thinnest of baseball books. The problem predated Ilitch and continues to this day.

But that’s another column, which I won’t subject you to now.

What concerns me, and what should concern Little I, being a businessman and all, is: Are the Tigers hemorrhaging fans?

Is baseball dying in Detroit?

Don’t dismiss the question.

It says here that baseball is dying on the vine in our town.

But wait, Eno. Winning solves all ills.

That may be true, but when?

The Tigers, in their current iteration, don’t appear close to anything resembling winning. And I’m not going by the opening weekend in Tampa.

Ex-GM Al Avila should know where all the bodies are buried, because he buried them. And every day, it seems, we’re finding out about another of them.

The Tigers don’t do what winning organizations do. They’re slow on the uptake. Embracing analytics is an example. The Tigers didn’t put any real resources into that area until 2017. That’s shocking. That’s not missing the boat. That’s missing the previous several boats.

The team’s international mining of talent has been mostly absent.

The insistence on drafting “big arms,” which went out of style in the early-2010s, was something that Avila and his lieutenants stubbornly clung to.

You know who the owner was during all this, right?

Hint: It wasn’t Little I.

Riffing off Marc Antony re: Julius Caesar, I come not to praise Mike Ilitch, but nor do I come to bury him. It took him awhile to find his way with the Tigers, but it was really only his checkbook that put lipstick on the pig for about eight years.

The lipstick wore off, and we’re still left with a pig.

It’s not exaggeration to call the Tigers among the three worst organizations in MLB—along with the A’s and Pirates. And that’s not just in terms of wins and losses on the field.

The Ilitch family ownership bobbed the Tigers to the surface for a time, but mostly it’s been killing baseball in Detroit. If winning was just around the corner, I might feel differently. Instead, the only corners involved here are in the maze in which the Tigers find themselves. Around the next corner is just another corner.

So yes, it’s tempting to say that if Mr. I was still kicking, this interminable rebuild wouldn’t be happening. That he would have cut bait on Avila sooner. But I’m not so sure. It was Mr. I who foolishly promoted Avila to begin with in 2015, when a new direction and a younger voice was needed. Loyalty, that dual-edged word, reared its head and Ilitch passed the torch from Dombrowski to his longtime second with nary a phone call to anyone outside of the Tigers organization.

The Tigers are still paying for that loyalty. And will, for at least the next three to five years.

How many more fans will be lost by then? How much more apathy will have set in?

Chris Ilitch may not share his dad’s passion for baseball, but the more fan interest you lose, the less Tigers merch you sell. I know I don’t see as much as I did in the playoff days. The fewer fans come through the turnstiles. The fewer hot dogs and beers you sell.

Baseball is dying in Detroit, in plain sight. The Ilitch family ownership has mostly been a failure. Let’s face it.

The Scott Harris Era is the last stand. If he fouls this up, it’s game over.

That’s not opinion.