The Importance Of The Detroit Tigers, by Rosicky Jones

While the Detroit Tigers are in the midst of an autumn run towards baseball immortality, Michigan is dealing with its economic mortality. Stories of the restorative properties of the Tiger’s recent run are so ubiquitous that even naïve Michiganders are taking notice. The distraction it provides is clear but the sociological catharsis attributed to the Tigers had been lost on me. I comprehend the removal from reality that sports provide but I often struggle to find the existential importance.

I recognize that sport is integral to a community’s fabric. Memories of innocence, our lost loved ones, ebullient periods, heartbreaking transitions, cross-country trips, first kisses, great meals, seminal points in our personal evolution; all comprised beneath the backdrop of sport. I don’t often agree with the hyperbole ascribed to sport but I am beginning to understand the why. I realize that speaking about life through sport helps us to keep reality at an arm’s length. I loathe the platitudes routinely tied to athletics, the longing for “good old days” and the “life or death” descriptors allotted to them.  But it makes sense, reminiscing about teams from our youth is actually an indirect recollection and yearning for our faded childhood. Speaking about sport as if it were life or death helps us grasp and imperfectly deal with actual life or death. A team’s success helps mask and momentarily ignore a community’s current ails. And if sport is the backdrop then baseball is the foundation all subsequent layers have been built upon. Baseball is the fabric of this country and neither waning popularity nor reverence alters the foundation.  Football is standing on the shoulder of baseball’s story as it becomes the millennial pastime.  The canonization of baseball stats has morphed into fantasized football stat matchups.  But as habits and allegiance changes baseball remains the first to ever engender such sentiments.

Baseball seems forever, the rhythmic melody from season to season, the yearly crescendo from spring ball to an autumn evening in the park, forever, even as society transitions between bliss and tragedy, baseball is forever. I could never quite grasp the importance of sport or of baseball in particular, until now. I did not get it; my neurotic pragmatism could not find the importance.

Baseball’s song is a nearly two-hundred-year-old unchanged melody. American institutions have come and gone, foundations of Americana are crumbling, cities vital to the country are distressed, but baseball rings true. Fathers have sat sons and daughters on their knees and watched the Tigers. During the last significant Tiger’s playoff run I was younger, in love, and watched the playoff matchups with my girlfriend and her father. During the current run I have been swamped with relocated friends who use my apartment as a hostel for an evening just to be in Detroit for a Tigers game.  This season meant no more to me than any other. But this playoff run exhumed blissful memories, brings back good friends to my apartment, brings back non-partisan hope and unity, brings back wonderful memories of a former girlfriend and of her now deceased but eternally loving father. I am a fan of Michigan and love the increase in pride and happiness. I see baseball’s importance when Tiger’s jerseys adorn nearly everyone I pass on the street, I see baseball’s importance with each additional day my apartment is used as lodging for my friends, I see baseball’s importance in every nostalgic conversation I have and in every optimistic set of eyes transfixed by a Verlander pitch.

Baseball is important because of its importance. Baseball is important because when it’s great, it rekindles past happiness while simultaneously creating memories we will fondly remember tomorrow.  Baseball is important because I see the importance in a random Autumn Detroit Tiger’s run.

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