A little fanatical...

VERY IMPORTANT UPDATE! 
A picture has been found! I repeat, a picture has been found! 

Verified proof of us at Tiger Stadium! 

A few weeks ago my dad found an old church directory that had a picture of a group of us at a Tiger game! He scanned the picture and voila! Here we all are. You can see me in the front row, next to Dad and Mom and Cousin John. Then two rows back you can see my Grandpa and Grandma Boutell! Love it! (Not sure where Ang is, my guess is she's off with Cousin Nicole and my Aunt Marie somewhere since Uncle Kim is there in the second row without Aunt Marie.) 

So yay! Yay for memories and fun pictures and Tiger games with friends and family! Here's to more of them in the future!

As many of you know, last year something happened to me.

I became a baseball fan.

Yes, I'd enjoyed baseball before last year. I went to my first Detroit Tigers game sometime before the old Tiger Stadium came down. Here's the proof:

I asked my dad if he had any pictures of us at the games and this was it. Out of all the photo books in all the world (we have a lot of photo books, a lot), this was the only picture of our trips to Tiger Stadium. It's not a bad picture. It's a lovely capture of the day -- what I can only imagine was a beautiful Saturday afternoon game. Maybe some of the guys in the picture are Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Kirk Gibson, Willie Hernandez, even Sparky Anderson coming out to argue a call. Maybe that's the back of my head as I'm eating peanuts, reveling in the very cool charter bus ride we'd had into Detroit. It's my dad's writing on the back of the photo, so I can be sure of where we were at least. (Ah, the days before a camera in our pocket 24/7 and capturing every single moments of our lives on a data byte.) I'd like to think we were enjoying the game way too much to be bothered to take a quick family shot. Yes, that's what I'll choose to believe.

So, I've enjoyed baseball for a while. When we weren't going to Detroit for a game, you could find us on Thursday evenings in the summer cheering on my dad and his friends who played softball for the church league. Here's that proof:

Our friend Lisa, my sister Angela, and Me! 

And later on, once Lansing added the minor league Lugnuts in the mid-90s, we made their games a regular part of our summers. It didn't really matter who we rooted for, if you were playing in Michigan, you were the home team.

Then I went away to college and baseball became a once a summer trip to a Lugnuts game with my parents and their friends. I made it to the new Tigers stadium, Comerica Park, on an alumni trip one summer with a college friend after I'd moved to Arizona but baseball fell off the radar. I'd catch playoff games on TV if the Tigers were playing but that was it. Until the last few years...

Two years ago I got the idea to write a television pilot set in the world of baseball. And not little league or the minors or high school. Professional major league baseball. In Detroit. And that's when it all began.

Hundreds of hours of research. Listening to old games online. Watching any game that played on TV. Reading books about managers and owners and statistics. (I still don't understand all the numbers. I never will. And I'm perfectly okay with that. You do not need to try to "teach me". Really. Don't.) Watching the few Tiger games we got on cable over and over again. And that was the beginning of the end.

The word fan comes from the Latin word fanatical which is marked by excessive enthusiasm and often intense devotion. Do t-shirts, sweatshirts, waterbottles, Tervis glasses, bracelets, pins, hats, apps, paid MLB TV subscriptions, calendars, satellite TV subscription for pre- and post-game shows count as excessive? 

Well, yeah, there you have it. Also, we made it to four games at Comerica Park in the span of six weeks while in Michigan. We'd have gone more but we really like those good seats, where you can see the players actually playing, and well, the Tigers don't pay us fans quite like they do those guys wearing the uniforms. 

So I became a fan. I also became a fantasy football, er, baseball league manager. (I call it fantasy football and no amount of correcting seems to stick in my brain, c'est la vie.) I joined a friend's league in the middle of July. I didn't even know such a thing existed before then. I thought fantasy was just for football and those horribly long books about trolls. (Don't yell at me, I'm just not a fan of them.) And what's the first thing I did on my FF team? 

Traded for all the Tigers I could get my hands on. 

Yep. Smart move right? Sure. When the Tigers are on a winning streak. I moved up from eighth to second place quickly. I "smack talked" on the boards. My friends congratulated me. And then? My plan backfired. I'm back in seventh place. Maybe having a team that's 75% Tigers isn't the best move. But? I'm a fan. What can I say.

And now it's football season. If you know me, you know I hate football. I find it boring. I find it confusing. I find it boring. Did I mention I find it boring. Did in high school when I went to almost every game wearing my letterman jacket and freezing my buns off on those aluminum benches. Did in college when our team (I think we had a team, we at least had guys who dressed up like a team) was horrible. I went to one game, stayed half an hour and headed back to the library. Did in grad school when I spent hours cleaning Waldo Stadium after the games as a fundraiser for our campus ministry. There was no way I could ever enjoy a game there watching thousands of people trash the bleachers I'd spend the next six hours climbing with my garbage bags. And I still don't get it. I've been known to inquire about Detroit's Lions (yes, Detroit has a football team, and no, that joke isn't funny even after the thousandth time I've heard it) from time to time. My dad watches them occasionally and he'll give me the ten-second update (they suck, what's new). I've seen my share of Thanksgiving Day games because it's more of a tradition then a game. But this year? I'm trying...and failing...to like football.

I was asked to join a fantasy football (I got it right this time!) team with the same friends who have the FB team. I told them I know less than nothing about football. They told me I was a warm body and that's all they needed. So I joined. And I got my sister Angela and my friend Susie to join. (Angela is team me in hating football. Susie is team football is awesome. She is trying to recruit us. It won't happen.) And we had our draft. My strategy? Pick two players I'd read about in national magazines (Time, I'm looking at you). They were cute. They seemed to be in the spotlight. I chose a few others who had good rankings on the site as well. And then? Let autodraft do the rest. (I did choose Detroit as my offense, or defense, I don't know really but I did it because, well, #DETROITpride people.) All in all, I put an hour into this endeavor, maybe two.

So what happened? Angela let autodraft pick her team. She spent maybe two minutes on the endeavor and all of that time was trying to remember her username and password that she'd set up a week earlier and promptly forgotten. And she got an A- on her draft. My score? D. And two of the players that were autodrafted for me? Free agents. Seriously. For the record, I still hate football. And if my FF team wins? I'll crow like nobody's business. But more than likely? I'll check my ranking once a week and forget about it the rest of time. Because, well, baseball isn't over and well, baseball's baseball. There's nothing else to say about that.

So. I'm a fan. I play fantasy football twice a year. I root for Detroit above anyone else. Who wants to come over for a game? 

Susie, Me, Angela -- I passed my fanaticism onto both of them and now we're all too far gone...