One of the things I like most about this site is its consistent collegiality, so I will try to wrap this up for you. It may indeed be troll-like (although I’m not sure what that means) to see if you’ll respond to my last missive rather than just try to explain what seems to have offended you.

The white people line was:

A) a joke, and

B) pretty accurate, as far as generalizations go.

First the joke part: It was in the vein of “Germans love David Hasselhoff” and the wildly successful website and book “Stuff White People Like” (camping, Mad Men, Volvo, etc., etc.). I am sorry you didn’t get the joke. I think it’s pretty harmless. I myself am very white, for what it’s worth.

The second part: Inge is a fan-favorite. You have acknowledged this. Baseball tends to have a pretty white demographic, especially in these parts. And Inge does some “great white hope” qualities: exceedingly athletic, exciting to watch, “clutch” (a dubious concept in general and as it applies to Inge).

So I think it’s fair to say that overall Inge probably appeals more to white fans of Tigers baseball than to Tigers fans of other ethnicity. I wouldn’t be shocked if management thinks about things like that to an extent, since white folks are buying most of the tickets. That doesn’t seem controversial or dangerous to say out loud to me. But again, it was a joke.

My overall point was that the Tigers had a lot of things going for them this year in terms of attendance-drivers. So while I agreed that “up or down” is relative to a lot of things, I’d say there’s some cause for concern with respect to attendance vs. TV viewership. Maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s other stuff.

Sorry to have unintentionally led us off topic. It was a throwaway joke line.