The Tigers after Mike Ilitch

Mike Ilitch in 2014.

Mike Ilitch, the beloved and big-spending owner of the Detroit Tigers (and the Detroit Red Wings in the NHL, and the founder of Little Ceasar's pizza), died Friday. He was 87.

Ilitch's death raises the genuine possibility that the Tigers will pull back from the win-now philosophy that has reigned there the past decade or so. Ilitch, who played minor league ball in the Tigers chain before knee injury forced him to find a different (and ultimately more lucrative) occupation, wanted a World Series title before he died. He didn't get it.
The word out of Detroit in the wake of Ilitch's death was that

• the Ilitch family will retain the teams; the Tigers and Red Wings will not be put up for sale;
• an Ilitch son has been the effective owner of the Tigers the past year or so and was the one who made the decision at the start of this offseason to stay the course with lots of veterans and a large, luxury-tax inducing payroll.

It seems possible to be that a different decision may have been made had the elder Ilitch died in, say, August. Mike Ilitch may not have been as active an owner as he once was, but I doubt there was any appetite for telling him to abandon those championship dreams.

Yet the odds were getting worse for the Tigers every year. The Tigers' arrow is pointed down. Miguel Cabrera and Jason Verlander are still outstanding players, but they are a bit less than they were five or six years ago, and they aren't getting younger.

Mike Ilitch fired Dave Dombrowski two summers ago when Dombrowski concluded that it was time to jettison some veterans and get younger. Ilitch didn't have time for a retrench and rebuild approach. Christopher Ilitch may conclude otherwise in the next year -- only he won't have Dombrowski, one of the most adept team builders in the game, making the moves.

Scott Boras, "business partner"

Scott Boras has found a sucker in Mike Ilitch, and has
convinced Ilitch that's a good thing.

This piece from the Detroit Free Press, contains a Scott Boras quote that cries out for some analysis:

"I told (Tigers owner Mike Ilitch), 'This is never easy, sir, because you're going to have to sign contracts that people are going to tell you aren't good contracts. My job is to make them good contracts by getting those players to perform and help you.' "

Since that purported conversation after the Tigers 119-loss season in 2003, the Tigers (and Ilitch) have been a favored landing place for Boras clients. And the Tigers have been to a World Series (2006) and won a division title (2011), which is certainly an improvement over 119 losses.

But have the Tigers' deals with Boras' clients been "good contracts?" It depends on how you want to define good. Some cases: 

Magglio Ordonez pulled in a bit less than $100 million for Ilitch and Co. over the past seven seasons; he had one huge season, a few good ones, and was a part-time player in three. Good contract or bad?

Ivan Rodriguez got $48.5 million over five years from the Tigers, including the three biggest salaries of his illustrious career; his production sank like a stone during that time. 

Rick Porcello, billed as an instant ace, got a record-setting $11.1 million deal coming out of high school. He has turned into Nick Blackburn — a low-strikeout back-of-the-rotation guy. (He also has a different agent now.) And now he's turning really expensive.

Last week Boras stuck Ilitch with Prince Fielder, a nine-year solution to the Tigers' one-year problem (the injury that will keep DH Victor Martinez out for 2012). Fielder's bat may make him worth his bloated salary for a while; like Mags and Pudge, he'll be a liability later in the deal.

Ilitch is willing to run pretty big operating deficits in pursuit of a few more wins. Boras is quite willing to help him run up those deficits, just as he helped Tom Hicks run the Texas Rangers into bankruptcy. The Rangers didn't grow into the two-time AL World Series representative that they are now until they shook their addiction to Boras clients. 

Odds are the Fielder deal won't swamp Ilitch financially in the way the Alex Rodriguez contract did Hicks. But Ilitch seems to me too much a sucker for Boras' sales pitch. Boras ain't his partner; he's the employee of some of his employees. Boras' goal is to extract Ilitch's money.

Prince Fielder, Mike Ilitch and the quest for value

Prince Fielder and Mike Ilitch: One is rich, the other is richer.

Now that Prince Fielder is officially a Detroit Tiger ...

The Tigers owe Fielder $214 million over the next nine seasons. They owe Miguel Cabrera $86 million over the next four seasons. They owe Justin Verlander $60 million over the next three seasons.

That adds up to $360 million for three players.

According to Forbes, which each spring publishes estimates of the worth of each major league franchise, the entire Tigers franchise was worth $385 million as of 2011. (Forbes valued the Twins at $490 million.)

Frankly, I'm over my head when it comes to numbers like these. I'd be a fool to think that I know more about finances than Tigers owner Mike Ilitch; he and his family have built an empire of pizza and pro sports and casinos and who knows what else that's worth at least $2 billion, and I ... haven't.

I don't even know if extremely pricey players such as Fielder, Cabrera and Joe Mauer count as assets or as liabilities when Forbes estimates a team's worth. There may be no real connection between payroll and worth.

But it feels out of balance for a team to have essentially its entire value tied up in three players.

Certainly Ilitch runs his team differently than do the Pohlads. Forbes consistently estimates that the Tigers operate at an annual loss of more than $20 million; the Fielder signing pretty much guarantees that will continue. The Pohlads have, I'm sure, subsidized the Twins from time to time, but in the main they expect the team to pay its own way.

The Pohlad approach seems to me the more stable way to operate.

Like the late Carl Pohlad, Ilitch has offspring who are active in the family empire, and it would seem likely that there is a succession plan in place — likely that the Tigers will not, when the 82-year-old Ilitch dies, enter the bizarre world of probate that ensnared the Red Sox and Royals when their big-spending owners passed on.

Still: The Tigers have a major market payroll and small market revenues. At some point, that contradiction is going to bite them.