truebluefan

Hang on to this season's treasures

Maybe you were like me a couple of weeks ago, digging through musty boxes in your basement, searching for all that old stuff you stowed away as a kid for the simple reason that it meant something to you then.

That's what the Tigers did to me this month: I went on a treasure hunt.

To be honest, I was the one in my family who bought baseball cards for the gum. Plus, I just knew finding any old cards was out of the question. My favorite player growing up was Dick McAuliffe, because of his batting stance, but I sold him -- for a nickel, I think -- one summer in the early 1970s, along with the rest of my collection. I pedaled through our Livonia neighborhood as a kid, yelling: "Baseball cards for sale!" What a fool I was.

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truebluefan

Early in Game 4, as the Cardinals were batting, I paused between several consecutive pitches to take a sweeping gaze at the gray-clad visiting team from Detroit arrayed around the infield and outfield.

I was thinking about what Hall of Famer Paul Waner said late in his life about his only World Series, with the Pirates in 1927: "I didn't seem to actually realize I was really playing in a World Series until it was all over."

I wanted to be sure, before the inning and the game and the World Series rushed to their conclusions, that I fully realized that the Tigers were here, at baseball's pinnacle, in the World Series. So I planted in my memory this sight of them manning their positions in this NL park against the NL champions. In doing so, I more fully appreciated their achievements this season than when I had seen those achievements happen.

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