| Growing up without baseball: The sad story of a post-1984 Detroiter |
| By Mike Pitcher Webmaster UPDATED April 12, 2005 (02:12am) |
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| For my whole life I have had to hear about how great of a baseball town Detroit truly is. I repeatedly hear about the magic year that 1984 was when the Tigers kept winning until there was no more games to win. When I hear about all of this, it seems like a lie to me. The idea of the whole city rallying around their baseball team for those late summer and fall four games series seems like the stuff of fiction, perhaps it would make a good movie, similar to Angels in the Outfield. Unfourantely for me, I have lived almost entirely in the worst period of baseball that any proud city has had to enure. It could be argued that the true loser in this period since the early 1990s where the Tigers have been losing until there were no more games to lose, are the people that expierenced the good times and now have to suffer through baseball purgatory. But the ultimate loser in this decade(-plus) run of awful baseball are those born after 1984 such as myself. The generation of post-1984 Tigers fans is almost nonexistant. It is easy to get together a group of guys in their late teens for the Lions, Piston or Red Wing games, but ask people to come over and watch the Tigers take on the Twins and you get blank stares, and questions like, "Why would I want to waste my time like that?" In fact the Tigers expierence for a summer is (at best) going down to the ballpark for one game and calling it a season. For years I thought this was what baseball was all about. I didn't think that anyone, in any city followed their team as passionately as the other major sports. I attributed it to the fact that there was about a million boring games during the season, and not a single one of them meant anything to anyone. The only time that baseball meant to millions of Detroit-area kids, was that it took up valuable sportscenter time that could be better spent on other sports, and that we had to sit through an hour of ESPN's Baseball Tonight, instead of watching Wedensday Night Basketball. Then something happened. I watched the MLB's playoffs last year, and saw the incredible emotion that the fans had for their teams. I couldn't believe how intense the Red Sox's fans were, or for that matter, how intense their hatred for the Yankees was. All of a sudden, I loved baseball. Every pitch was dramatic, every move by the managers was debated by the entire room, and not one second of it could be considered boring. That was it, I saw what meaningful baseball could be, and I was an immeadiate convert. Flash to this year, and suddenly, my beleagured Tigers are fielding a competive team for the first time in over a decade and I can't help but want to be part of their first division title in forever. I can't wait for meaningful baseball in Detroit and it should be coming this August when I will be hanging on every pitch, like it is life or death, and loving every minute of it. And maybe, just maybe the Tigers will be able to regain this lost generation of post-1984 sports fans. Mike Pitcher is the Webmaster of The Fan's Sports Opinon Page email him at [email protected] or leave comments HERE |
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