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Pepperdine students venture off to school with hometown loyalties to teams all over the country. I bring mine from Detroit.
As the playoffs begin, Detroit will see Fenway Park and Wrigley Field proudly displayed in baseball’s elite month of October. Patience in their nostalgic parks worked for them.
Pac Bell Park, which shares its birthday with Detroit’s Comerica Park, will flaunt McCovey Cove and its linelessly mowed grass. The hype of a competitive team in a new stadium worked for them.
This year the Detroit Tigers narrowly eluded infamy, but missing the record for the worst team ever doesn’t mean they completely avoided that tag. This 103-year-old franchise’s escape with 119 loses , while an expansion team set the official modern-day record of 120, may have actually pushed the Tigers even lower.
Any kind of record would have at least given the fans something in return for enduring another losing season in a long line of losing seasons in Detroit; a firm vindication for having to put up with such an embarrassing hometown team; provided national empathy; or even garnered hope the humiliation would force the owner’s hand to make a change.
As it was, the Tigers were just a really bad team that only the most loyal of fans could tolerate.
The betrayal on the promise to field a winner in the new park provides the nasty aftertaste to this season.
Before the Tigers’ recent move into Comerica Park, Tiger Stadium, built in 1912, was old and decrepit. Which, in baseball terms translates into historical relic. The “Old Lady” stood proudly as the most senescent of its kind, edging Fenway for the honor by one day.
The new retro stadium in Texas modeled their right field overhang after Detroit’s original.
But owner Mike Illitch ignored the “Save Tiger Stadium” rally cries of his team’s fans and played the competitive-necessity card in constructing a new stadium, milking the city of Detroit to fund the procedure.
The promise of a competitive team lured in enough voters.
However, Illitch didn’t come through on his end of the bargain.
Small market, large market, mid-level. The Tigers cannot spend the same to field a team as the Yankees, Red Sox, or Dodgers.
So what do fans really deserve from their team?
“Look at the mid-‘90s Cleveland Indians teams as they moved into Jacob’s Field,” the Illitch gang sold their propaganda to the city to fund their new stadium. “That’s the kind of competitive teams you’ll be getting.”
Those Indians teams didn’t win a World Series. That’s not what was promised to Detroit fans. And that’s not what Detroit fans bought into. They were sold on competitiveness, one part emerging talent and another part owner’s commitment to spend mid-level money.
The team the Tigers put on the field revealed they received neither.
As the losingest team of the 1990s, the Tigers were cheated by their owner. In this new decade the fans continue to be cheated by fate, as a season ending 5-1 record to complete the disaster left their team one loss short of the 1962 New York Mets.
No justice for Tigers fans.
We’ll all cringe as the Yankees’/Twins’ series shifts to Minnesota with its astroturf and as hash marks and yard lines deface our viewing pleasure in Florida and Oakland.
During the postseason, the nation will witness a lesson Detroit has learned. Winning teams can take the field anywhere. However, this perennial losing team lacks commitment from the owner.
Submitted October 02, 2003
MALIBU, CA
