Dear Reader,
Forget COVID. Forget billionaire owners and millionaire players holding spring training hostage. Forget the inevitable April snowstorm to come.
Baseball is heading back to Michigan, where some of the world’s most avid sports fans are waiting to get a seat in the sunshine, a plate of nachos and a cold beverage to root on the Detroit Tigers.
But even the most diehard fan may not be as eager to see the season start as Evan Woodbery, who covers the Tigers for MLive.com. Like major league players, Woodbery got sidelined by this winter’s lockout.
“It reminded me of those months when baseball was off the grid during the COVID season in 2020,” Woodbery said. “It’s not a fun feeling to be a sportswriter without sports or a baseball writer without baseball.”
Although the MLB labor strife threatened the season, a deal was reached that included a later start than normal – April 8 is the Tigers’ home opener – and preserved the entire 162-game schedule.
“Off days may not even be off days” due to the compressed schedule and rain makeups, he said. “We’re going to have baseball pretty much every day from now until early October.”
Even when baseball was in doubt, Tiger fan engagement never wavered. Woodbery is one of MLive’s best-read authors, and I marvel at the consistency of fan interest in his stories. Tigers stories got more than 1 million reads in March; even small posts on minor leaguers being shuffled off to another team are gobbled up by fans.
“It's a great baseball market with a lot of not just current interest, but historical interest going back generations,” he said. “And it’s a regional market – it goes far beyond Detroit.”
Detroit Tigers fandom has run on hope rather than results for the better part of a decade now. The team last made the playoffs in 2014 and went from a top-spending team under late owner Mike Ilitch to a full-on, fire-sale rebuilding project.
There was a flicker of progress last year as the team made a late-season flirtation with a playoff spot. This year, a couple of top prospects are poised to crack the lineup, and the team signed big-name shortstop Javier Baez just before the lockout, raising fan enthusiasm.
“I felt like (the lockout) was such a missed opportunity for the Tigers more than just about any other club in baseball because they garnered so much enthusiasm right before the lockout,” Woodbery said. “The biggest risk to baseball is not that fans were really, really angry. It’s that fans stopped caring.”
Winning heals all wounds, so how much healing will Tigers fans be in for this year? Since I’m an eternal optimist, I predict a second-place finish and a spot in the playoffs.
“I think probably .500 is a better barometer for this team,” Woodbery cautioned me. “Maybe they make things interesting down the stretch. I think that would be a victory.”
With expectations tempered, let’s put on our Old English D ballcap and count the positives:
We get to see Miguel Cabrera collect his 3,000th hit sometime early in the season. We’re likely to see prospects Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson crack the lineup, maybe even on Opening Day. Due to the lockout, there will be more doubleheaders on the schedule. And in a few days, the Tigers announce all the new food creations we’ll see at the concession stands this season.
Hope springs eternal. Even the lockout had a silver lining.
“Let’s be honest: Not having baseball in late March is not the worst thing in the world for those of us that live in northern climates,” Woodbery said. “What could have been a really horrible situation – the loss of part or all of a season – turned out to be not as grave as we thought.”
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🎧 On this episode of Behind the Headlines, John Hiner and Eric Hultgren talk the REAL first day of Spring, opening day of Tigers baseball with Tigers beat writer, Evan Woodbery. Listen here on Spotify.
John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.
