I was 9 years old. Alan Trammell was 19. Lou Whitaker was 20.It was 1977.
One night, I sat down with my dad to watch the Detroit Tigers. George Kell and Al Kaline were calling the game. I became a Tiger fan.
The 1977 Tigers were in the midst of their fourth-straight losing season after nearly a decade of success that included a World Championship in 1968, the year I was born. The star players of 1968 were gone. I had missed out on the phenomenon that was Mark "The Bird" Fidrych the year before.
It wasn't the best time to be a Tiger fan.
But I didn't know any better.
The Tigers won that night. I remember my dad, ever the cynic, saying something about hoping that I wasn't misled into thinking this was really a good team I was following.
But the team that would become the 1984 World Champions was taking shape.
Whitaker and Trammell made cameos in the big leagues that year. Jack Morris and Lance Parrish also debuted.
By 1978, I was hooked. I followed the Tigers every day on TV or the radio, living and dying on the outcome of their games. Most of my schoolmates preferred football. I liked baseball.
Soon, things would turn around for the Tigers. Sparky Anderson was hired. Trammell, Whitaker, Parrish and Morris became the backbone of a contending team.
In 1984, the Tigers quickly became a national story with their 35-5 start. A team that had been largely ignored by the national media during my previous seven years of fandom was everywhere. I soaked it in, eagerly collecting publications such as Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News that featured my team on the cover.
By then, I was 16. My French teacher, Sister Barb, was also a Tiger fan. We happily discovered that we could steer the classroom discussion away from conjugating verbs by mentioning her beloved Tigers. "How about those Tigres?"we'd ask, resulting in a five-minute discussion about the previous night's game.
I couldn't score playoff or World Series tickets, but I was glued to my television during the postseason. I watched one game at the reception for an unfortunately timed wedding. I caught the World-Series-clinching game from my living room, watching Kirk Gibson's home run put the game out of reach.
In a way, 1984 was the end of my childhood. In the coming years, the outcome of Tiger games would become much less important. Part of it was the expectation. Now that the Tigers had won the World Series, things were different. It's always more fun to root for the underdog.
Part of it was me. I was older now. Who won or lost a baseball game didn't seem as important as it had been.
I still loved baseball. But I found other ways to enjoy the game.
In 1988, I discovered fantasy league baseball. A friend convinced me to join a league. It quickly became an obsession.
In the days before the Internet, when a key free agent became available, an owner had to drive to the baseball card shop that hosted our league to put in a claim. More than once, I drove across town at odd hours of the night to improve my team.
Some would say that fantasy sports corrupts a fan's interest in the game. I was rooting for "my players" when they went against the Tigers.
But for me, it kept my love of the game alive during lean times for the Tigers. Gibson and Morris left the Tigers for more money elsewhere, I reasoned. So why should I be blindly loyal to the same team?
I still watched the Tigers. But I shrugged off losses that would have been devastating in my youth.
In 1996, I lost a little bit more of my youth. Trammell, my favorite player as a child, retired after 20 seasons with the Tigers. A player I had followed since that summer of 1977 was now gone.
Baseball would make me feel old many more times. When Tiger Stadium closed. When Kirk Gibson became the team's color analyst. (Al Kaline seemed really old when I was a kid. Now Gibson was the new Kaline!) When I realized that no one who had played in the big leagues in 1977 was still an active player. When I became older than most of the players on the Tigers. I think the final insult will be when I'm older than any active major-leaguer. (Stay healthy, Tim Wakefield and Jamie Moyer.)
I never quit following the Tigers. But sometime in about 2003 or 2004, I started following them a bit more like I did as a child. It had to do with a girl.
I started dating Rene in 2003. We began watching the Tigers together. At first, I enjoyed being a non-fan. I openly rooted for my fantasy players when they went against the Tigers. I expressed little or no emotion when the home team lost.
Rene was different. She grew fond of the players on the team, just as I had in 1977. The team was a lot like the 1977 team. It wasn't very good, but was accumulating players who would send the Tigers back to the World Series in 2006.
Rene cheered for Craig Monroe and Brandon Inge. She was thrilled when Pudge Rodriguez signed with the Tigers. Being a cynic, I explained that Pudge was only doing it for money. Why else would he sign with the worst team in baseball?
Gradually, I found myself rooting for the Tigers more. And in 2006, the team returned to prominence for the first time since I was in college. Rene (now my wife) and I went to 20 games that year, including Spring Training, the regular season and the postseason. When Kenny Roger shut down the Yankees in the playoffs, Rene and I (with an unborn boy in utero that would be named Jack) waved our towels from the upper deck. Fantasy baseball was the last thing on my mind.
Now, Rene and I take Jack, 2, to the Tiger games. I'm still playing fantasy baseball, too. Being a die-hard fan of "my team" and the Tigers at the same time is the best of both worlds.
I've been a professional writer for 18 years now. But I've never really written about baseball. After all, there are only so many jobs covering major league teams.
So I guess this blog will be my way of writing about the game I love.
Much of it will be related to the Tigers. I might write about fantasy baseball, but I don't plan to go into diatribes about how some bum that I drafted sucks and is "killing my team."
I may be a fan, but as a journalist I'm also an objective analyst. I like Bill James, Baseball Prospectus and "Moneyball." So I'll try to provide some analysis along those lines.
And maybe I'll look back to 1977 from time to time.
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