Sports

Grip This With Your Icy Fingers: 48 Days Until Detroit Tigers Begin Spring Training

It's cold enough to freeze a brass monkey's – well you know. But the beloved Detroit Tigers are counting down the days until Spring Training begins – in warm, sunny Florida.

Yes, this cold bites – right to the bone, chewing through three layers of fleece, warmer-reinforced mittens and a ski mask that covers all but your frozen eyelashes and brows – but here’s a warm thought to get you, especially you whose jobs toss you out in this ridiculous teeth-chattering cold, through it:

There will be baseball.

The Detroit Tigers begin spring training in just 48 days. And that’s in Florida, where the long-range forecast says it’s going to be 75 and sunny – 75 and sunny (unless this polar vortex completely bollixes what we know to be “normal spring weather”). In fact, you can get a hot baseball rush when spring training ticket tickets officially go on sale at 10 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 11.

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If you can’t make it to Florida (sad face), you can sit back and enjoy Spring Training from your warm, cozy living room. The 2014 Spring Training broadcast schedule features 22 radio broadcasts on WXYT and four television broadcasts on FOX Sports Detroit.

In the meantime, let your fancy turn to baseball.

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Sure, your fingers and toes are numb now, but Spring Training in sight makes it OK to start thinking about the 2013 All-Central Division Champions and those hot summer days when you can almost feel the splash of the of the centerfield fountain at Comerica Park, when everyone around you understands why you use “Randy Smith” as a pejorative, and when you write in the names of Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell in local elections because, doggone it, their incessant snubbing by the Hall of Fame board is just not right.

Grip onto that with your icy fingers, and all the other inside jokes that make you a Tigers fan:

You look back fondly on memories of peeing in the trough at The Corner in the old Tiger Stadium.

You understand Rod Allen’s catchphrases.

You’ve held a vigil or built a shrine to Brandon Inge, or aggressively defended him on a sports message board or social media site.

You have specific reasons for an abiding hatred of Kate Upton.

You put “have a beer, whiskey or smoke with Jim Leyland” is in the Top 5 on your bucket list.

Yes, think about that, and not that you couldn’t find a baseball in all of this snow if it were painted Tiger orange. It’s no seventh-inning stretch to imagine that’s the crack of Jose Iglesias’s bat you’re hearing as you gingerly make your way across a mound of stiff, crunchy snow, or that the big pile of snow at the intersection is the mound at Comerica Park and Max Scherzer is about to throw out the first pitch.

Who’s your Tiger? Tell us below in the comments.



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