ESPN.com
DETROIT -- It's a day to remember. Except it's supposed to be a day to forget.
It's a day when all that cool stuff you did last year becomes officially irrelevant. Except it's also a day when all that cool stuff you did last year gets replayed on the local Jumbotron about 100,000 times.
It's a baseball holiday known as Opening Day. And on Opening Day, the great baseball wise men are always telling teams like the Detroit Tigers that it's time to turn the page.
But somebody ought to tell those great baseball wise men: "Hey, you try turning the page when everybody around you is busy unfurling banners, raising flags and shooting off enough fireworks to light up the entire state of Michigan."
And so, on Monday, the defending American League champions sat in their dugout on the first day of a brand new season, watching a nostalgic, heart-thumping ceremony unfold before their eyes.
"It was pretty emotional out there," said Tigers center fielder/blogsmith Curtis Granderson, on an afternoon when the defending American League champions began their quest to crank up another magic act. "I know a lot of guys, when they showed that video and raised the banner, were starting to go. I know Marcus [Thames] and I were sitting there, tearing up a little bit, watching all those moments from last year."
But of course, we know -- and they know -- there's no tear-ing in baseball. And there's also no freezing time, much as the world around them might occasionally prefer that to real life.
So if the Detroit Tigers needed any assistance Monday in remembering that their world will continue to spin and that 2006 was now as defunct as the brontosaurus, the Toronto Blue Jays were only too happy to help them remember.
They helped out plenty, with a 5-3, 10-inning win over the Tigers that performed a valuable public service:
It reminded us that, on opening days like this one, there may be only one team doing the tearful reminiscing. But there are two teams dreaming about having the kind of season that makes for all those tearful reminiscences.
"You know, it was fun [watching that ceremony]," said Blue Jays third baseman Troy Glaus, the man who drove in the winning run Monday. "It was awesome. They had a great season. They deserve all the accolades they got. That's great. I'm happy for them.
"But you know what?" Glaus mused, with a smile. "It would be fun to do that up in Toronto, too."
It's a kind of fun that Troy Glaus knows all about, too, by the way. In 2002, he played on an Angels team that had exactly the kind of year the 2006 Tigers had -- except that those Angels didn't just get to the World Series. They won it.
Then, just like these Tigers, those Angels brought back 23 of the 25 players on their World Series roster. And the following April, they also lined up along the baseline on Opening Day with the very same vision that these Tigers had Monday -- that they could recreate that World Series formula just the way they'd done it the year before.
And then ... uh ... oops. It took them, oh, about three hours to find out precisely how tough that is.
Those Angels lost on Opening Day. They had a losing April. They finished eight games under .500. And it turned into a year that still lurks in a dark corner of their memory banks, jabbing at them when they least expect it.
"Hey, it's difficult to repeat," Glaus said. "There's a reason it doesn't happen very often -- in any sport. They [the Tigers], like us, had a lot of things go right. They played good baseball. They stayed fairly healthy throughout the entire season. And that's awesome. That's great. Congratulations. They had a great year. But a new year is a new year."
And once you get into that new year, well, "things happen," Glaus said. And boy, do they ever.
"For us, in '03, we had a couple of guys get hurt," Glaus said. "We weren't able to replace their production. And the next year turned out to be a disappointment. ... But I think everyone understands that -- hey, it might seem ridiculous because it's so clichéd -- but it is a new season. It's clichéd, but it's the truth. It happens every year."
You always hate it when life slams head-long into one of those pesky clichés. But that's where the 2007 Tigers find themselves all of a sudden. Still dreaming the same dreams -- but finding themselves with the same record as the Devil Rays, having to start all over again. How fair is that?
Last year, the Tigers launched their season with a five-game winning streak -- and never had a losing record for one day in the whole darned season. This year, it took them precisely one game to find themselves with a losing record.
Last year, they started off so hot, it took them 69 innings -- until Game 8 of the season -- before they got three runs behind at any point in any game. This year, it took them precisely one inning. Or six hitters, if you really want to get technical.
This year, their Opening-Day starter, Jeremy Bonderman, walked the first hitter he faced. Then he gave up as many hits in the first inning (three) as he allowed in 6 2/3 brilliant innings in the first start he made last year. Funny how that happens.
Bonderman kept telling folks later that he "wasn't nervous at all." But he spun off five scoreless innings after that first inning, allowing only two hits. So draw your own conclusions.
"It's a new season," Bonderman announced afterward. "There's nothing now we can look back on and say, 'We did this and this and this.' The truth is, we didn't do anything this year. So we've got to go out and prove it all over again."
They almost did, too. Down three runs against Roy Halladay, they pulled even by the fifth inning. And that, said manager/philosopher king Jim Leyland, "is not easy."
But did that comeback set the stage for one of those Hollywood comeback wins they kept manufacturing last summer? Not in this studio, it didn't.
Last year, it seemed like the Tigers always won these battle-of-the-bullpen games. But they didn't win this one.
In this one, the Blue Jays' make-it-up-as-they-go-along set-up crew of Casey Janssen, Scott Downs and Jason Frasor spun off three hitless innings. And that group actually wound up outpitching the Tigers' theoretically untouchable bullpen parade, of Joel Zumaya, followed by Todd Jones, followed by losing pitcher Fernando Rodney.
The good news was, Rodney scooped up a swinging bunt by the first hitter he faced in the 10th (Reed Johnson) and fired the the baseball over to first base, 100 percent accurately. Which isn't quite the way his team's pitching staff executed that play in the World Series.
But the bad news was, that out was followed by a single, a walk, a hit batter and Glaus' game-winning single (on an 0-2 changeup). And when any reliever has a sequence like that "it usually spells disaster," Leyland said, astutely.
"If you walk a guy and hit a guy in extra innings, you're probably going to get beat," the manager said. "That's true whether you do it in June, July or August."
And he's right. It's totally true. Except it wasn't June, July or August. It was Opening Day. Turn The Page Day. And this wasn't how any of them would have scripted the page-turning.
They spent a month and a half in Florida, talking about how conscious they were of storing their 2006 memories in a vault they had no plans to open. But you try to pull that off, on a day when the largest crowd in the history of your ballpark shows up to bask in those very same memories.
Asked if an Opening Day like this was the hardest day of any year to relax, Zumaya replied: "Yeah, on my part, it was especially if you open up at home. I was so anxious to see those fans, and be out there with the vibe of the fans. I think it's tough. Really tough."
Then again, Zumaya said, when he thought about it, these fans weren't even as amped up as the 80,000 fans he'd hung out with the night before at Wrestlemania, down the block at Ford Field. So in the big picture, this day could have been tougher:
Roy Halladay could have tried to slam him over the head with a folding chair or something.
But even though they dodged those prospective folding-chair assaults Monday, the challenges for this team are far from over.
Because the 2006 nostalgia festival is far from over.
In Game 2 on Wednesday, there's yet another act coming. On Wednesday, they'll line up before the game one more time -- to receive their championship rings. While more videos play, no doubt. And more fireworks burst. And more tears flow.
But at some point, once the rings are all put away and a few baseballs get hurled toward home plate, that will be that. Finally. And the Tigers' transition into their Brave New 2007 World can really get rolling.
"Wednesday will be like the best Dr. Phil session this team could have," Jones said. "It'll help us deal with closure, get our rings and that's it.
"Look, don't get me wrong," Jones went on. "It will be very nice. I'm very respectful of it, because it doesn't come around that often. It never has for me, so I can't wait.
"But for this team," said Todd Jones, "2007 can't come fast enough."
Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.
Source : http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=stark_jayson&id=2823321
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