Mike Valenti: "This is a joke of a baseball town"

The Tigers have lost four in a row to fall to 18-17 on the season, and Valenti was "apoplectic" watching another wasted pitching performance Monday night:

"I was effing mad last night. I wasted my night watching that garbage. Jack Flaherty was electric and this team lost another 2-1 baseball game. And why is it in this town that the media never has our backs as fans? Why is this media and you in your car and you in your cubicle and you telling me to go bleep myself, why are you so spineless? Where are the standards in this town?"

To make his point, Valenti tells "a tale of two cities, a comp for how I think we should be behaving in this town, versus how we are." In City A, "Ownership is getting shredded, on radio, television, god forbid in print, the GM has been booed in any public setting, the calls for the manager’s head are on an everyday basis. There’s anger in the streets. And they’re only 5 games out of first."

What's more, City A is a Midwestern town where the baseball team "had a winning record for 15 straight years before last season, and 23 of the previous 25. City A went to four World Series in that time span and won two of them. And the team, despite its market size, spends at a near top-10 payroll."

City B, also a Midwestern town, hasn’t made the playoffs in a decade and has one winning record in that span. "True cellar dwellers," says Valenti. "The owner refuses to spend, nobody really presses him, the manager is Teflon, as if he’s Casey Stengel, and the GM you can’t say a bad word about because the bots come out. The GM thinks he’s got all the answers. He’s eating caviar and feeding you garbage."

City A: St. Louis. City B: Detroit. To which Valenti asks, "Why are fans in St. Louis irate with their team? And you people sit here and continue to eat this garbage that this organization feeds us? What will it take in this town for people to look at this and go, 'This is not fair to us?'"

The answer, says Valenti, is standards, "and we don’t have them. And that's a disgrace."

"Let’s just break the news: this is my 20th year in town and I’m ready to say something. This is a joke of a baseball town. No standards, no care factor, no passion, no deep understanding of the game, and let it roll. This team has a 90-win pitching staff and a 65-win offense and they don’t try. The GM openly doesn’t try.

"Why do we not have standards for this baseball team in this town? Why is a barely .500 record championed?"