I’m a lousy baseball fan, so bad, in fact, that nowadays I’d describe most of the regular season as excruciatingly boring. Still, I am feeling some emotional pull (an intensification of home or childhood or both) from the Tigers’ domination of the Yankees and A’s, their impending trip to this year’s World Series. It sends me right back to 1984, the late-summer my maternal grandmother died, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” thematizing the successes of Gibson, Parrish, Trammell, Chet Lemon, Morris, Berenguer, and the rest. I was 10, and so invested in MLB that I listened to many games on the radio. Sheesh.

I wore a Tigers hat almost every single day in those days. All the adults fretted: “You’ll ef up your hair for good!” One unforgettable day on the school bus, a couple of bullies even tested my will when they swiped my beloved cap and tossed it out the window. Later my mom drove me to the site so I could recover the coveted hat from the weedy ditch where it landed–in front of the most putrid farm along Winn Road. And now for an astonishing fact: I still have the hat. I hadn’t given it a thought in years, but just remembered that it was stuffed in the one bin of old crapola (a tape drive, 45s) down in the basement. The hat doesn’t fit me any more (which means I should probably part with it). However, if it did fit, I’d happily put it on to more heartily celebrate the Tigers’ return to the WS.

Think I was making it up?