| Dan Cash. 9th August, 2005 - 3:29 pm
 For years Detroiters have prepared for the beginning of the Detroit Tigers baseball season. Fans have dreamed, wondered, hoped, for anything more than the year before.
1987.
An interesting year in many aspects of life, but it also represents the last time the Detroit Tigers were being mention ed in the race for the World Championship. It’s a year many Tigers fans remember in a painful way, after a loss to the heavy underdog Twins, it was a hard pill to swallow, knowing that it was the last Tigers playoff game on the books.
It’s a team that subsequently went on a consistent slide towards the bottom of the standings for over 15 years. Slowly but surely the team moved further and further down the line into what for the last 5 years has been considered the laughing stock of Major League Baseball.
In a league filled with winners, losers, and mediocre teams, the Tigers sat below all of them. Culminating in the 2003 season that featured near record numbers of losses, team average and fan attendance.
It was a year that was supposed to be for rebuilding, a year that would bring all the youngsters through the system in a crash course meant to train them on the job. 119 losses later, it was nothing short of an embarrassment.
Its t he some old story that’s been written a hundred times, the Tigers are not going anywhere, because no one wants to play in that run down city. Why subject yourself to the perils of a city riddled by crime and suffering, when San Diego, Los Angles, Miami, and New York city are all calling your name.
Those days are over; the days of a run down, beaten city on the brink of collapse have taken a back seat to a city looking forward to its present, rather than its future. The city is rebounding, the all star game, the Super Bowl, the Ryder Cup, the NBA finals, all major events, that are proving slowly but surely, that Detroit isn’t what it once was.
The players are coming, the stadium is built, the fans are cheering, and the team is once again on the rise, well kind of.
Ordonez, Rodriguez, Percival, White, Young, these are prime time names. Names that share 2 World Series rings between them and more playoff experience than you can possibly count.
After all the losses and all the pain, fans have gone through, this year was supposed to be the year the Tigers broke out of the basement and moved into the prime time.
It didn’t happen, a season in which a near .500 record at the all-star break brought hope and pride to the city is slowly spiraling out of control.
As the Tigers find themselves several games below .500 a change in the manager position has consistently come up. As Alan Trammell struggles through yet another disappointing season, it becomes more and more obvious that it’s not the losses that are hurt the most.
It’s the way the games are being lost, managerial mistakes, botched ground balls, dropped fly balls, and above all else mental errors from experienced players who know better.
Any fan can appreciate a player who gives an all out effort on an every day basis, but it’s the games that are lost through mistake after mistake that really get the fan in an uproar.
Loss after loss can be cured, by a win the next day, but it’s the ones that prove the team is no further along than it was the day before, which truly hurt more than any loss ever could.
Are they on the rise? Who knows? In the end the real question remains, how hard will they fall from the relatively unstable pedestal they are clinging from.
Playoffs? I think not. |
