DETROIT – Late Tigers owner Mike Ilitch talking with reporters in Comerica Park’s Tiger Club was a regular sighting once upon a time, when the room was used to announce big free-agent signings.

As the Tigers introduced top Draft pick Riley Greene on Friday afternoon, Tigers chairman/CEO Christopher Ilitch was there, sitting in the front row. It’s not a coincidence that he was in the neighborhood.

When the Tigers were scouting players last spring for the top overall pick, Ilitch was heavily involved. He sat in on some scouting meetings to get an understanding of the process, and he traveled to watch eventual selection Casey Mize pitch in a game at Auburn. He wasn’t as directly involved in the process on Greene, he said, but he said he watched a lot of video courtesy of the Tigers' front office.

Now that Mize is working his way up the Tigers' farm system, including Friday’s five-inning, eight-strikeout performance for Double-A Erie, Ilitch says he’s still watching Detroit's top prospect per MLB Pipeline, albeit from afar.

“I could be accused of following all of our prospects’ progress a little more closely than perhaps I should. Internally, our guys send out information about how each of our prospects is performing on a daily basis, and I read it every day,” Ilitch said Friday. “In fact, a lot of times I’ll pick up the phone and talk to [general manager] Al [Avila] and say, ‘Hey, I saw such-and-such happened. What happened here?’ I enjoy it.

“But to answer your question, I follow it very closely, and I follow Casey Mize’s progress exceptionally closely.”

In that sense, he’s like a lot of Tigers fans these days, tracking the rise of prospects up the system while looking for signs of progress amidst the struggles on the Major League side.

Unlike some Tigers fans, Ilitch does not appear to be clamoring about when Mize or other prospects will get to the Majors. When the club embarked on this rebuilding project, it did so with the full support of Ilitch, who talked about building a blueprint for sustainable success through young talent.

The Tigers have modernized their player development system with investment from ownership, creating a computerized analytics database, investing in technology and partnering with the University of Michigan’s Sport Science department. Those tools came into play when evaluating Greene.

“What I’ve learned in professional sports is that you need an awful lot of things to go right,” Ilitch said, “but it starts first and foremost with having a great team of people to go out and assess talent. And then you have to draft really, really well, which I think our team is doing. And then you have to be world-class in developing your players and give them time and bring them along at the right pace, and not rush them. And then you need an awful lot of breaks. You need health, you need chemistry.

“There’s a lot of things that go into it. So to predict a time frame, you’re asking the wrong guy. That’s a better question for Al, and I don’t know that he could pin it down for you. But I would tell you and our fans, everybody at the Tigers' organization is working as hard as ever to advance our plan and our progress as quickly as possible. We all want to get there as fast as we can.”

In the meantime, Ilitch said, he’s keeping an eye on it like everyone else.

“It’s a big part of my responsibilities to make sure that this ballclub and this organization is moving forward on our plan, and I have a high degree of confidence that we are headed on the right path and we’re seeing great progress,” he said. “That’s what excites me, and ultimately, that’s what I hope excites our fans. They’re smart fans. They, too, are monitoring what’s happening in the Minor Leagues. It’s our future. It’s fun to watch, and as I tell a lot of our fans as I see them around town, it’s going to be all the more sweeter when hopefully we are competing in the playoffs and we are competing for championships, that we’ve lived through this developmental phase. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Pinch, Hit & Run lands at Comerica

Major League Baseball and the Tigers hosted the annual MLB Pitch, Hit & Run competition at Comerica Park on Saturday and honored several youngsters who won their respective divisions.

Pitch, Hit & Run is MLB's official youth skills competition. The top 12 baseball and top 12 softball qualifiers from all over Michigan competed at Comerica Park with hopes of advancing to the National Finals during 2019 MLB All-Star Week in Cleveland.

The winners:
• 7- and 8-year-old Softball Division: Autumn Schroeder, Three Rivers
• 7- and 8-year-old Baseball Division: Nolan Ferraro, Garden City
• 9- and 10-year-old Softball Division: Nailea Sepulveda Roman, Detroit
• 9- and 10-year-old Baseball Division: Andrew Mahoney, Novi
• 11- and 12-year-old Softball Division: Anna Carlson, Bloomfield
• 11- and 12-year-old Baseball Division: Owen Fulsher, Lake Orion
• 13- and 14-year-old Softball Division: Jennifer Henegar, Woodhaven
• 13- and 14-year-old Baseball Division: Ben Wedge, Rockford