On apathy, the Detroit Tigers, and the future of Bless You Boys

Hey everyone, remember me? It has been a while since I’ve written anything here — a week for you, the reader; an eternity for me — and, surprisingly, the Detroit Tigers are still awful. They are no longer on pace to be the worst team ever, thankfully, but with 100 losses already in the books and three weeks of bad baseball still ahead, I hope you will forgive us for not jumping into each game and series with our usual zeal.

I can’t speak for everyone on our staff, but I have had an especially difficult time focusing on the Tigers this year. Part of this apathy stems from other circumstances — I was without internet at home last week, and puppies generally don’t like to sit still for three-plus hours at a time — but it also comes back to how the Tigers are performing. It’s not fun to watch a baseball team this bad, as you well know, and it’s certainly not fun to write about it. Our game previews have all but disappeared, game recaps are a struggle, and just about all analysis boils down to “well, they’re bad.”

This isn’t to condemn the Tigers for their performance this year (we’ll do that elsewhere). The 2019 season was always going to be the nadir of their rebuild, and no matter what the experts say, the jury is still out on how this crop of prospects will eventually perform at the major league level. No matter how things unfold, it will involve a lot of patience from us fans as the team takes its lumps and undergoes its (hopefully abbreviated) growing pains.

What does this mean for Bless You Boys?

Nothing, hopefully. We will continue to do our best to cover the 2019 season, depressing as it may be. Game-to-game content will largely depend on how interesting the matchup is — does anyone really want to read how overmatched the Tigers are in their upcoming series? — and we have a few ideas for analysis over the next couple weeks. We will also be jumping into some end-of-season looks at the top prospects in the organization. Our midseason list kind of fell by the wayside once the trade deadline happened, and there aren’t any tentpole events like the MLB draft to prop us up like earlier in the season.

Going into the offseason, we will do our usual season-in-review — as much of it as we can tolerate, anyway — before jumping into the offseason rumor mill and all of that fun stuff. We are open into suggestions, as always, and will continue to promote FanPosts to the front page and highlight the excellent work this community is known for.

Yes, it will be worth the wait

In my week without internet, I spent a lot of time watching Youtube videos on my phone. Among those were a number of MLB The Show streams (yes, I was very bored), which persuaded me to research how much a PS4 and copy of the game would be. As usual, the game allows you to play with a number of former greats, but one of the most enticing options was Hall of Famer Alan Trammell, along with other Tigers legends undoubtedly included in the game. Justin Verlander’s recent no-hitter also brought with it clips of this old commercial, further reminding me of the great moments this franchise has had over the years.

It helped remind me of why we do this, and why years like this are so frustrating. The Tigers will be good again one day (hopefully sooner rather than later), and will eventually bring home their fifth championship. We can’t promise we will be here when that happens — as other fanbases can attest (hi Cleveland), it could be a looong time — but we promise to be better about covering them in the meantime. Even if it’s not the most fun for a little while.