I have a confession. I want to be honest and come clean. But first…my intro. I spent the younger years of my life moving around from town to town across Canada. Throughout all of my moving about I was lucky enough to have a home base…Windsor, Ontario. Windsor is where my grandparents lived and where my Aunt and my cousin lived. Because of this transient lifestyle that my father chose for me I never really had a favorite baseball team. I was always a baseball fan but never had a childhood team that I was able to fall in love with. In time, as a ten year old through my teenage years, I found my teams due to the players that played with them. Because of Dale Murphy I loved the Braves. I rooted for them through the eighties when they finished last more often than not. In 1985 I fell in love with the hapless Redsox and Wade Boggs and a rookie named Roger Clemens. Also in the eighties I rooted for the Athletics with their dynamic duo of Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. The Mariners also became a favorite in the mid-eighties with players like Harold Reynolds, Ken Phelps, and Jay Buhner. As you can tell…I love baseball and a lot of the teams that come with it. BUT here is where things get a little difficult for me to talk about. I think that I am a Tigers fan.
I know…I know. My friends know too. I am often their harshest critic. Living across the river from Detroit since I was in grade 8 has given me constant exposure to the Detroit Tigers. They are the favorite team of most of my family members and most of my friends. Due to my difficulty with conforming to authority and basically everything, I fought as hard as I could against rooting for the Tigers. I give up. I have given up before. In fact, in my life I have owned three Tiger hats…two of them as an adult.
This time, however, I am not giving up because of peer pressure or the fact that they reside so close to where I live. This time I give up because the Tigers need me. They need me to root as hard as I can so that they will win. They need me to criticize, not harshly like before, in order to help them improve. AND THIS WILL HAPPEN.
Don’t get me wrong. I am still cheering for the Sox with all my heart. Ichiro and the Mariners will get my love too. I will still watch TBS when the Braves are on. I am just taking on a new lost puppy by the name of the Detroit Tigers.
I already listen to at least 50 Tiger games a year. I already listen (almost daily) to Detroit sports radio listing their rants and raves about the Tigers. This transition should not be hard. This year I am taking on (AGAIN) the Detroit Tigers. FAIR WARNING…I am no slappy. I will call ’em as I see ’em.
I guess this is also a good time to say that I feel that my blog has lacked focus. I have been blogging since October and have been trying to find myself. It’s hard for me to blog from the perspective of my other favorite teams (the Sox, Braves, Mariners) because I don’t live in or near the cities they reside in and I can’t get an accurate feel for how the general public feels at any given time.
I am revamping my blog and I am revamping my own baseball experience. I am going to root for and blog for the team that I know best…THE DETROIT TIGERS. So this is it. I am not going to give up on my other teams but I am going to root, root, root for the home team and I am going to blog about it.
STRAP ON YOUR SEATBELTS.