Saturday, October 28, 2006

World Series

World Series

I am not devastated.

I would be devastated if thought this would be our only shot at it. And though we've all been caught off guard by the success of the Tigers this year, I have no reason to believe they won't be this good if not better next year. The pitching will be back. The bats will be back. Leyland will be back.

I am a little disappointed.

We didn't play well enough to deserve a World Series title. We're a better team than St. Louis, but it doesn't matter when your pitchers spot them a few runs a game with throwing errors on routine ground balls. No one can tell me the week off was a good thing. The Tigers backed into the playoffs and somehow found something after losing game one to the Yankees, then rattled off a herculean seven-game win streak. They could do no wrong, they were a machine. And then they had to sit impatiently for seven days; I guess it was like the night before Christmas that wouldn't end. All after playing six times a week for more than six months straight. I wonder what goes through your mind when you're forced to wait for the World Series like that.

The "experts" all got it wrong in the ALDS, then they got it wrong for the World Series. No one gave the Cards a chance, and that should raise some Cardinal-colored flags. The Tigers were the obvious favorites. I heard one guy on the radio guaranteeing St. Louis wouldn't win a game. That, I think, is when I knew the Tigers probably weren't going to win the World Series. In light of all the expert prognostications, I have no interest in checking out any of the spin. What can they say other than that the Tigers just played badly?

But it's okay. We have an off-season to get another good bat. Who knows what's going to happen. But we'll be competitive again next year.



One Love.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Baseball in Detroit

Baseball in Detroit

I can only speculate that baseball was once a special and marvelous thing in Detroit. I can’t say for sure what it really was because I’ve only heard from other older people what it was once like. The Tigers won the World Series eight months after I was born. They last made the playoffs when I was three. And they last had a winning season when I was nine.

Since I can remember, the World Series has been that heralded mythical matchup of two teams that other people in another part of the country root for. It’s the thing you pretend to play in, that you picture yourself in when you’re seven years old playing ball in your backyard with the neighbor kids. It’s the bottom of the ninth and you’re down by two with two outs and there are three guys on base. Actually, your brother is on third base and it might be the eleventh inning because you stopped counting. It’s all in your head. The World Series for me has been somewhere in my mind next to being an astronaut or becoming a superhero.

October, to the Michigan baseball fan, has become someone else’s month. It’s when we pick a fallback team and root for them. It’s that time of year when we root against the Yankees. We try to pick the outcome so we might have something to enjoy. Cards in six, I said last year. For a long time, lots of people forgot there was baseball in Michigan.

And I think I did, too.

The Tigers were never really bad when I was a kid. I watched them on television with my family and collected their cards as best I could on a second-grader’s budget. One pack a week, as I recall. Every Saturday, my brother and I would ride with Dad in his Nova to Sportscard Stadium, where we’d buy a pack and Dad would ogle all of the old baseball cards. The Tigers were our team, then. They were only a few years removed from a good playoff run, but I didn’t know or care much about the playoffs. All of their players were, in my mind, the best ones. I remember Tony Phillips’ batting stance, and Cecil Fielder’s 51-homer season. I remember Travis Fryman and even Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell. A few times, we made the road trip to Tiger Stadium. I had the privilege of watching baseball at the corner before it moved over to Comerica.

But then in 1994, there was a strike and I stopped caring because all of those guys I watched on TV just wanted more money.

And since the strike, the Tigers have given us little reason to watch. Sparky Anderson left and Buddy Bell took over. Gibby, Tram, and Lou got old. Higgy joined the team and wouldn’t go away. While the skipper changed hands from Buddy Bell to Larry Parrish to Phil Garner to Luis Pujols to Alan Trammell, the Tigers lost more than 1100 games. They moved the stadium and named it after a bank and sniffed at a winning record again. While the Tigers continued to field a team that probably couldn’t Juan Gonzalez came to Detroit and did nothing.

All the while everyone forgot that there was baseball in Detroit. In 2003, they became a punch line, striving for the incredible futility-mark of 120 losses.

But it’s 2006, and the Tigers are a new team. A few guys are still around from that abysmal AA-team that lost nearly 120 games – Inge, Monroe, and Infante never left, and Santiago rejoined the team this year. The Tigers pitching staff is not really all that different – Bonderman, Robertson and Maroth all started games this year. Ledezma, Rodney, and Walker are still in the bullpen. But there are a few new faces: Guillen is our MVP. We’ve got Pudge and Maggs and Polly. Granderson is one of my personal favorites. We’ve got talented rookie pitchers in Verlander and Zumaya. And we have a pitching coach in Kenny Rogers in our starting rotation. All of this after a disappointing, inactive off-season.

They started to win early this year. They were 7-7, and most of us who’d been following the team for a while knew they’d be better than before. Jim Leyland was the manager now. And somehow, that was the tipping point for the Detroit Tigers. Bless Alan Trammell all you want, but a new personality in the dugout, particularly like Leyland, wouldn’t let them lose anymore. By May, they were in first place above the defending champion White Sox. They cruised to 40 games above .500 – this from a team which hadn’t had a winning season in 13 years, and finished 20 below .500 last year.

And everyone remembered that there was baseball in Michigan. Tigers merchandise was everywhere - slung on the department store racks only as long as they could keep it in stock, and sported by everybody who seemed to have forgotten about them. The Tigers were cool again.

They built a ten and a half game lead above the second place White Sox, but it slipped away to the Twins in the latter half of the season. The Tigers would finish the season needing a single win at home against the league’s worst team – the Royals. On the final game of the season, one base hit away from their first ever AL Central division title, they lost the game, getting swept by the Royals and losing the title to the Minnesota Twins, backing into the playoffs to play the $220 million Yankees. But they were in the playoffs. Who could complain? I told myself that I would only be disappointed if they would get swept by the Yankees, which would put a fitting end to an improved but imperfect season.

They dropped game one in New York, but took game two, bringing the best of five series back to Detroit. Then Kenny Rogers pitched. And then Jeremy Bonderman pitched. And we were in the ALCS and the Yankees went home.

And now, we’ve shut down the A’s, and we’re a win away from a sweep and the World Series. The Tigers fan’s mind has struggled to grasp the achievements of this team all year, and it has never been more difficult than it is right now. We’re not picking a fallback team. We’re not calling it for the Mets or Cardinals, or rooting against the Yankees. We’re just enjoying it… taking it in and wondering what comes next.

I don’t know what I’ll do if the Tigers win the World Series. They’ve done no wrong in this postseason, and I have no reason to doubt them now. If they can win the World Series, I will cry. Honest.

The bandwagon doesn’t bother me. I’m excited to have so many people enjoying and loving this team. It’s incredible to have so many people to talk to about Tigers baseball.

It sure is nice to have baseball back in Detroit.

Monday, October 02, 2006

Sport!

Joey is right. Today is not a good day to be a sports fan. Letdowns abound as the Tigers and Lions both lose games. It’s not all that surprising; they’re ongoing, disturbing trends: The Tigers have backed into the playoffs after being swept at home by one of the worst professional sports franchises in recent history, and the Lions are, well, the Lions.

The Lions and Tigers are two of the three teams to which my allegiance as a fan is tirelessly devoted. The third is Michigan State, and this was not a good weekend for them either as they were beaten in homecoming by Illinois, who has not won a conference game since 2004.

It all compounds: I have this hopeless belief in sports karma, or balance, or equilibrium, some sense that says all of my teams can’t possibly lose on the same day. It’s against the rules or something. There’s no way a loving God would subject me to such a fate, right?

Well, the Tigers are in the playoffs. That’s good, right? And besides, we should be happy and surprised. Everyone forgot there was baseball in Michigan for a long time. The bandwagoners can’t give you the names of anyone who was on the roster when they lost 119 games. Well, maybe they can… a lot of people tuned in to lust after that loss record. But, playoffs or not, we can by no means be happy with the last few months of D-town baseball. Especially when today’s loss yields a wildcard birth after holding onto first place for more than four months…and it had to be the Royals! I can understand getting swept by a team like Minnesota, or Oakland, or Chicago. Or maybe a team that didn’t have 100 losses, or one that didn’t need to call up AA ballplayers to finish the season. Is that so much to ask?

But the point is, we are none too thrilled going into the postseason. The season is not a loss. I love that the Tigers are tasting playoff baseball. I love it. But in the last few months, they’ve strung together enough disappointments to taint an otherwise great season. We’re not confident in the product on the field.

Speaking of not being confident in the product on the field, how do we let our hopes get up for the Lions anymore? Are we nuts? It’s some consolation to see the offense pick up against the Rams, but this is just one week. I’m ready to tune in each week to, like Tigers fans a few years back, lust after a mark of futility in a winless season. Then, the Fords can ruin the career of another high draft pick. I apologize in advance to Brady Quinn.

I’m not going to go into MSU football. It’s just that every year around this time, we all begin to look forward to basketball season a little more. Maybe the Spartan diehards will start looking into tickets to the Motor City bowl or the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl. I can think of no better way to cap a 6-5 season than to spend a December evening in beautiful downtown Detroit.

Once in a while, all the losses coincide and I get a weekend like this one. When you’re a fan of those three organizations, it actually happens a lot. Today, when I heard the end of the Tigers game, I turned off the radio in my car and pouted. (This is how you reduce the manliest of men (not that I’m talking about myself here) to the most immature, silly state imaginable: You have his sports teams lose.) But as I sat and muttered and sulked, aloof in my Escort, I began to realize just how petty my mood was.

And I wondered why we allow our emotions to be so affected by a group of millionaires on a playing field trying to get a ball across a line. I’m sure there’s some Freudian-psychology-ego-study-thing to account for this, but I haven’t looked into it yet. We invest so much hope into our teams, and we stand by them in their wins and losses. We identify with them – their joys are our joys and their disappointments are ours as well. Unfortunately, our hope can become so misappropriated to distract us from real life. And the blessed escape for three hours of football can be soiled by an evening of depression if our team doesn’t pull of a win. To go to 1-3. There is so much more to take joy in, and so much more to get justly enraged about. None of which should revolve around guys vying for Nike endorsements.

One Love.