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Detroit Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris has started the restructuring of his front office.
Amateur scouting director Scott Pleis was fired after 15 seasons with the organization, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told the Free Press. An email was sent to members of the scouting department Friday morning. The Tigers would not confirm or deny this report.
The Tigers fired former general manager Avila on Aug. 10, in his seventh season as general manager, and hired Harris to lead the baseball operations department Sept. 19. Harris took control of day-to-day operations Thursday after nearly three weeks of evaluating the organization.
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The 2022 season marked Pleis’ 15th with the Tigers and the 12th in his role as the amateur scouting director. He oversaw the entire amateur scouting department and played a key role with the most influence in MLB draft decisions.
He joined the Tigers as a national crosschecker following the 2007 season, after scouting for the New York Yankees (1995-2004) and Chicago Cubs (2005-07). The Tigers elevated him to amateur scouting director in August 2010.
David Chadd, currently listed as an assistant general manager and once known as Avila’s right-hand man, was responsible for hiring Pleis in 2007. He joined the Tigers in November 2004 as vice president of amateur scouting and became vice president and assistant general manager in August 2015.
He has worked for the Tigers for 18 seasons and remains employed in some capacity as of Saturday morning.
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As assistant general manager, Chad assisted Avila in the creation and implementation of organizational priorities and long-term planning. He scouted players and advised Avila on which top prospects to target in MLB drafts. In August 2021, Chadd kept his assistant general manager tag but transitioned into a role that focused more on player development and scouting, rather than MLB-level decisions.
Chadd is viewed as a solid evaluator of talent in the traditional sense, and although he isn’t considered progressive in terms of analytics and performance science, he provides a different perspective that Harris could find valuable. He was recognized by Baseball America as the top scouting director of the 2000s and interviewed for the Baltimore Orioles’ general manager position in 2018, a job that eventually went to Mike Elias, then the Houston Astros’ assistant general manager.
Before joining the Tigers, Chadd spent eight seasons (1994-2001) in the Florida Marlins’ scouting department and three seasons (2002-04) as the Boston Red Sox’s director of amateur scouting.
Avila joined the Marlins in June 1992 and stuck around until the end of the 2001 season, joining his former boss from the Marlins, Dave Dombrowski, in April 2002. In 2001, Chadd served as the Marlins’ director of amateur scouting under Dombrowski, who was hired by Mike Ilitch as Tigers president and CEO in November 2001. Dombrowski later added the title of GM early in the 2002 season.
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