New Tigers fan here

You’re off to a perfect start. You already know more about the Tigers than some of the folks at MLive.

If you cant already tell, we’re all a good group of people. I used to comment a lot, but ive been sticking to Twitter (@rothben if you use it), but everybody is always welcome. If you can’t already tell, we’ve got some of the best fans in baseball. The Tigers have a great team this year (minus Brandon Inge of course)! Im sure you will be able to learn all that there is to know soon enough, as most of these people know what theyre talking about! And by the way, refrain from using the ‘M’ (;. Some tips: Its RABURN, NOT RAYBURN. DD is Dave Dombrowski (The Tigers GM, the one that makes all of the player-based moves) JL is Jim Leyland, the on-field manager, JV is Justin Verlander, the best starter in the game! JT is Jacob Turner, our top prospect (Pitcher) NC is Nick Castellanos, our top position prospect. And lastly, dont listen to any commenters from MLive. Welcome again!

Hi Jared,

I pretty much lurk, but I’ve been reading this site since right around when Ian started. It’s by far one of the best baseball sites on the web, and we have a really great community here. People are knowledgeable, accepting and have a pretty good sense of humor. Really, you couldn’t have picked a better place to be a fan, or a better baseball team to be a fan of.

The Tigers are a great team to root for and suffer with. They started way back in 1894, and are the only team left from the Western League, a league that existed before MLB consolidation. They’ve been great — through the ’30s and ’40s — and been absolutely wretched — the ’50s through mid ’60s — and back again. Just eight years ago, they were the losingest team in American League history. Last year, they won the division and would have gone to the world series if not for terrible weather in Texas.

The Tigers have some great names that you should know if you’re a fan of baseball at all. Ty Cobb, baseball’s biggest bastard and legendary small ball player, was a Tiger. Four times, Cobb got to first on a walk or a single, then stole second, then stole third, then stole home. The Tigers also had Hank Greenberg, who has been called America’s most important Jew — he was the best slugger of his era, and he refused to play on Yom Kippur, which brought Jewish identity to the forefront of American consciousness. Folks like Al Kaline and Mickey Lolich, heroes of the ’68 team, still get talked about.

For the modern era, we won the series in ‘68 and also ’84 (’84 had Alan Trammel, Kirk Gibson, and Jack Morris). ‘84 is where we get the “Bless You Boys” slogan — it was sarcastic at first, but we won and won in ’84, and that’s when a lot of us here became fans of both Tigers and baseball in general. We made it to the world series in 2006, and we’ve been contenders pretty much every year since, barring a couple crappy collapses.

Right now, we have two major marquee players: Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera. Verlander’s probably the best pitcher of his generation, and won both the Cy Young and MVP last year. Miguel Cabrera’s a batting monster, probably the best batter in the MLB after Albert Pujols. (Also, we have Don Kelly, our mascot. He’s a wizard who does everything OK, but nothing great.)

One other thing to mention about the Tigers — for most of our lives, they had the best announcer in baseball, Ernie Harwell. Harwell was one of the last great announcers, full of folksy lines like, “He stood there like a house on the side of the road.”

If you’ve got any more questions, feel free to ask — the guys do a good job at answering ’em and giving primers on SABR (actual scientific-type stats, as opposed to the common but weak ones like ERA) that will make you a better baseball fan on the whole.

Welcome!

… so can someone please give me a hint on what the ‘M’ word is? Something like how many letters? second letter? Last letter? Anything?

It’s a long, hard road.

Every 20 years or so, the Tigers win something. While that’s better’n a team like the Cubs … it still makes for some lonely nights.

‘68 and ’84. The team was fully in line historically to win in ’06. Considering an awful Cardinal team and the fact that many Tigers had their career year … one could say a WS title in ’06 was almost inevitable. Alas, it didn’t happen. No one can explain why, even to this day.

One hopes as a veteran Tiger fan(let alone, a NEW Tiger fan), that the ‘06 miscue didn’t reset the 20 year watch on a Tiger World Series all over again.

If you’d like to see ‘your’ team win a World Series, you could do worse than picking the Tigers. It’s been proven that WS winners always have a HOF player or two on their roster. The Tigers right now have two such players, and they are just entering their prime. That means if the General Manager of the Tigers has even a smidgen of ability and puts enough ‘average’ players around these two HOF candidates … sooner or later the Tigers are going to win at least one WS. At least, chances are.

Welcome to being a Tiger fan. The over-riding thing you’ll find about Tiger fans? They are easy-going wonderful people. The kind of people who will applaud the play of an opposing baseball’er if he makes a superior play … even if said play contributes to a Tiger loss. You’ll see it often from Tiger fans. They are knowledgable, and love baseball.

Stick around, the Tigers and their fans are worth it.