Go cry at the ballpark, man. It’s good for you.

None of this should have ever happened. All of the dorks who were up to their noses in stats and storylines had figured the Detroit Tigers would have no business playing baseball in October when the playoffs rolled around.

In August, those dorks projected Detroit had a 0.2% chance of making the playoffs. It was all but certain: The Tigers just weren’t good enough. They didn’t have good enough bats. They were sending out a team of rookies and enthusiastic nobodies to play on the highest stages of baseball. They just weren’t ready yet. They were too young. 

But the dominos started falling for the Tigers and somehow they shocked the world, clawing their way into the playoffs by way of some statistical anomaly. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did, and now you have a bunch of guys who are too young and inexperienced playing baseball in October. 

I’d argue they are perfectly young. 

You see, recently I have begun feeling that I would like to be younger again. I suppose that feeling — a dread that could only belong to the loser of an unwinnable battle — comes with debt, taxes, deadlines and bosses. Nowadays, I sigh the way my father would when I was a kid. I come home from work and sink into my couch, perhaps mustering up enough gumption to stand up, walk to the TV to turn it on (we’ve lost the remote control in my house) and watch a ball game. 

And then I’m young again. 

According to my estimation of the world, there is a bright green, half-cracked portal to boyhood in downtown Detroit. It’s a vast, grassy span, shaped like a diamond and populated by a rotating cast of nine boys who do a special little dance for about three hours per night, 81 nights per year. 

Don’t tell anyone my secret, but inside Comerica Park, or even at the ballpark down the road from your house — any baseball diamond in any corner of the world will do, truthfully — is some youthful magic. 

There’s something religious about it all. The ballpark routine, steeped in tradition, goes beyond the god-like figures dancing for everyone on the diamond. Every fan in the stands is expected to play along in the performance. By the seventh inning, someone begins playing an organ. The sound tells everyone, without words, to stand up. Notes boom from fingertip to organ, organ to speaker and speaker to eardrum. The sound, sliding over everyone’s head, reminds us: Take me out to the ball game. Take me out to the crowd. 

It’s worship. You rise. You sing. You bear witness. 

On Oct. 1, 2023, I went to see Miguel Cabrera, the greatest Tiger of all time, retire at the end of a meaningless late-summer game. As I watched Miggy, my hero, wave to the crowd one last time and walk off the field, I cried like a little boy. I cried like I did when I was 9 and the Tigers lost the World Series in 2012. Bearing witness to the end of Cabrera’s career felt like a solemn key at the end of the song of my youth. 

On Oct. 10, 2024, a little over a year later, chasing a similar melody, I went to bear witness to everything that should have never happened at the timeless jewel in Detroit — I went to see the Tigers play game four of the American League Divisional Series against the Cleveland Guardians. 

My sibling, Kennedy (who I grew up playing baseball with, of course), and I joined a record-breaking crowd in Comerica Park, and we became young again for a few hours, shouting from the nosebleeds and eating peanuts and Cracker Jack the way the song tells us to. 

In the third inning, a young man appeared in front of me and Kennedy. He was wheezing from the climb up to the third deck and was determinably sweaty by both scent and appearance, dripping and odorous. 

He asked if anyone was sitting in the vacant seats next to us. We said yes, it was a sold-out crowd. They had just gone to the bathroom. 

He sat down anyway and through deep breaths told us he would be sticking around for a second. 

“I just hopped the fence and ran from a security guard. I’ll leave when they come back,” he said. “I just need to catch my breath.” 

Sitting beside us that night, clad in a navy blue shirt, logoless black shoes and nondescript sweatpants, was a champion of youth. He caught his breath and told us he had been down in Cleveland, doing the same thing for the two nights prior. He’d do anything to see the Tigers play — except buy a ticket, of course. 

He stuck around for another inning, got booted to a different seat and eventually left our section of the stands altogether, throwing us a thumbs-up before scampering down the stairs and disappearing into a great mass of observers, filtering his way out of anyone’s sight, watching the game in obscurity. 

Soon after the fence-hopper took off, the Tigers lost the lead to the Guardians in the fifth. José Ramírez, a switch-hitting, five-tool slugger, sent a ball 418 feet into left field. Everybody gulped. 

Wherever the fence-hopper went, I’m sure he saw the Tigers respond in the bottom of the fifth with a home run of their own off the bat of Zach McKinstry. Unlike Ramirez, McKinstry is as average a baseball player as you can get. But at Comerica Park that night, he tapped some magic, sending a ball just over the fence in left field, knotting the game back up.  

We jumped. We hugged. We waved the orange commemorative towels we were given at the gates, and so did everyone else. McKinstry, with one hand up in the air, rounded third and headed home. 

“These fans are going crazy,” said Jeff Francoeur, the announcer. 

I couldn’t hear him at the time, but he was right. If you squinted your eyes, with those orange towels flickering all over the stands, it looked like Comerica Park was ablaze, a fire burning in everyone’s hair. 

But all fires burn out. Kennedy and I watched as the Tigers lost the lead again in the seventh inning and never earned it back, falling to the Guardians by one run, condemning themselves to have to win the next game or go home for the rest of the season. 

I’ll save you the suspense: The Tigers lost two days later, and the team that shouldn’t have been playing finally gave in to the odds. Detroit baseball is, officially, over for the year. 

Baseball is the only game that, in a way, wholly commands time. Outside of the fact that the ballpark is a portal to youth, the rulebooks say the game never really has to end. Tied game? Keep playing until it’s over — until one team can muscle across another run and take the game. 

It’s unlikely, but you could walk into a ballgame and stay there for hours, watching something that never has an end. It might be suspended and picked up at a later date, but the rules say no ties; it ain’t over till it’s over. 

One hundred and sixty-two times per year, baseball players set off on a ship that might never come back home. The odds are in their favor — the game will likely find an end — but there’s a subtle uncertainty in beginning something that might never conclude. 

Unfortunately, though, this has changed in recent years. As much as I appreciated the timelessness of the game, other fans didn’t. With viewership dwindling and massive profits becoming just a little less massive, the Major League Baseball powers that be changed the game altogether.

There’s a pitch clock now, speeding up the game. Extra innings begin with a runner already on second base, making a score more likely and shuffling everyone along toward the end of the game. Advertisers didn’t want to place their commercials on slow, boring games nobody was watching. They wanted a captive, enthused audience. So the rules changed. The game changed. 

And it’s these rules that remind me of the way things change as time goes on; the game is different, my body is different, my worries and desires are all different and none of us are young forever. 

No matter the theoretical possibilities of infinite baseball, it all comes to an end and we are all sent back out onto the street — me, you, the pitcher, the umpire, the announcer and the stranger who hopped the fence. The game is over. The Tigers lose. Corporations sell more ads and everything moves too fast. 

All that’s left at the end of a season that defies the odds and sends you back to the mind of an untroubled 11 year old, watching your heroes thump baseballs further than you ever will, is the promise of next season and the trust that someday, like an enthusiastic nobody rounding third and heading for the plate, you too can come home again.

Statement Correspondent Liam Rappleye can be reached at rappleye@umich.edu.

Related articles