Early Baseball

This afternoon the Detroit Tigers will play their second baseball game of the 2024 season. While I love the game and look forward to it every year, March 30 does feel early for the sport.

It used to start later. When they had regular doubleheaders the extra dates weren't needed. Skimming through an old 1971 Tigers yearbook I noticed 18 scheduled twin bills, two games on one ticket. Now they only play them when rain outs force it. 

Doubleheaders were what I lived for as a younger fan. The instant the new schedule appeared I filled out my social calendar with whenever two games would be played at old Tiger Stadium. It was my summer guide; all else was plotted around those twin bills.

Hopefully rain will help me see one sometime this year. It did in 2022; I took a half day off when Detroit played two against Oakland. They actually played three last year, but I was just too busy with work to take advantage of the situation. I almost filed a grievance against my boss though.

Oh well. Play ball! It's the whole point of summer.

Dear Athletics Fan

On a lighter note today, since yesterday's blog was only on attending a couple of baseball games yet had become rather more whiny than I honestly intended it to be, I will tell you of the vaguely humorous aftermath of that doubleheader.

Here's a bit of background which might help you understand things: the first game of yesterday's twin bill (do the Minnesota Twins ever play twin bills?) at Comerica Park in Detroit was technically a make-up game from a postponement from week one of this year's baseball season. The Tigers were supposed to play the Oakland Athletics in Oakland then, but in order to play a full 162 game baseball schedule one game of the postponed three game series was added onto the only trip Oakland was to make to Detroit this year (The Tigers and A's will play a doubleheader in Oakland in July to make up the other two). As such the Tigers, even though the game was in their home stadium, batted first as the visiting team. Oakland was considered to be at home due to the rescheduling, and batted in the bottom of the innings.

It was weird enough to watch the Tigers bat first while wearing their home uniforms, well, at home, as they should. Yet as I had purchased my ticket online apparently Major League Baseball thinks I'm an Oakland fan as it was supposed to be a home game for them. That must be the case, as this morning in my email was a letter addressed, 'Dear Athletics fan'.

You see, MLB wanted to know about what it was like for me to be at an Oakland home game. The email explained that the sender was interested in my experience at the Oakland Coliseum, where they play their honest to goodness home games. It would only take me 9 -11 minutes, I was assured.

I might just answer it. You know, mess with their heads a little. I could sing the praises of the Coliseum even though it is generally considered the worst stadium in the league. After all, the Tigers won. I would have been just as happy about that In Oakland as I was in Detroit.

True Twin Bill

For me, if there's one thing the baseball lockout accomplished which I rather like is that it forces MLB to play true doubleheaders. Doubleheaders are two games played on one ticket.

Twin bills, as they were often called, were at one time rather prevalent. Going through some things in the attic sometime last year I stumbled across my 1971 Detroit Tiger yearbook. The Detroit Nine that year played 18 scheduled doubleheaders between the road and home. 18. Now true twin bills are extremely rare. Typically baseball has one scheduled over the course an entire season, if that.

The Tigers actually played one last Wednesday (May 4) but I couldn't make it. There was simply too much work which had to get done, and even a self employed grunt has to have something of a conscience. But things had eased up a vague bit this week and I decided the hell with it, I was taking the afternoon off and going to yesterday's. Who knows when the next one will be?

I used to live for doubleheaders. As a teen I would check the schedule out the instant it was available and mark them off, scrounging up the money to attend as many as I could. Once I had a family of my own the entire crew would go, although by then there was usually only one a season. By the early 1990s they only appeared due to scheduling necessities. 

There appeared to be few such necessities. Oh, there are the atrocities of what are called day-night doubleheaders, where one game is played in the early afternoon and the other in the evening. Yet they require separate tickets and are not, so far as I'm concerned anyway, true twin bills.

I could go into the reasons why things have changed. But that would quickly become a screed, which this threatens to do as it is. I don't want to do that. I simply want to revel in the fact that, for one Tuesday afternoon, all was right in the baseball world. I was happy to take advantage of it.