Gage: At 200 games, is Ausmus a good manager?
DETROIT -- Go ahead and criticize Brad Ausmus, if you want.
You're a paying customer. It's your right.
Then again, maybe you're not a customer at all, but a writer or a talker. As long as you can substantiate your argument, nobody's going to object.
Managers are fair game. They know that when they take the job. So do general managers.
When he was a columnist with the Detroit News -- in fact, on his first day with The News -- Rob Parker referred to Tigers' general manager Randy Smith as "Rancid Randy" 13 times in the same column.
Excessive by most standards, but what's excessive to one is standard to another.
Some critics target spider veins, others go for the jugular.
Nobody has gone after Ausmus' jugular yet, but scalpels and blunter instruments certainly emerge when it's believed he has made a mistake.
Even if he pays attention to criticism, it doesn't appear to bother him.
Managers better be thick-skinned. I once had one ask me if I ever ask a positive question.
I thought I countered with a good reply by saying, "When the situation warrants. Don't you remember?"
We got along, though, that manager and I. We don't see other often any more, but we still get along. And most of the time he was a heck of a manager.
An occasional bumpy road is nothing new, however. When Ausmus pinch-ran for Miguel Cabrera on Sunday night, many objected.
That's part of baseball. If the move had worked, the squawk would have been barely audible.
So whether you're still forming an opinion about Ausmus' competence as a manager, or if you already have formed one -- whether positive or negative -- what always speak the loudest are numbers.
Did a manager win or lose? Now, you know as well as I that managers neither win nor lose most games. That's up to the players.
But collective outcomes are assigned to the manager. And that's why, with Ausmus approaching his 200th game as Tigers' manager, it's a good time to see where he ranks among those who have lasted that long in the same job.
In that pursuit, however, you have to realize that the Tigers generally keep their managers around a while.
The search to find the last 10 Tigers' managers who have managed at least 200 games took me back to 1964 when Charlie Dressen managed his 200th.
A later manager, Larry Parrish, came close, but came up 14 games short at 186.
So, back to the bottom line: How does Ausmus compare in his first 200 games on the job with his nine predecessors?
Word of caution: Wednesday night's (regular-season) game was only the 196th for Ausmus. But unless he does something dreadful before Sunday, such eating a Domino's Pizza in the dugout, he'll get there.
Here's where he ranks:
Name First 200
Jim Leyland 119-81
Mayo Smith 115-85
Billy Martin 112-88
Brad Ausmus 110-86*
Sparky Anderson 107-93
Charlie Dressen 103-97
Phil Garner 97-103
Ralph Houk 90-110
Buddy Bell 69-131
Alan Trammell 62-138
* Four more games needed
Some will say that all this shows is that Leyland had better players than Trammell.
And that Smith had better players than Bell.
To some extent that's true -- which acts as built-in protection, for a while, of those with talent-deprived teams.
Give a manager good players, though, and the cauldron starts boiling faster -- which it might continue to do for Ausmus this year, if early heat is any indication.
But if you are an observer who goes strictly by the numbers or even mostly by them, you're probably not upset.
Ausmus' teams have had talent and so far he has enough wins for his record be a plus.
In other words, winning -- even in cases of inherited talent -- trumps grumbling.
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