This story is part of FanSided’s Fandoms of the Year, a series spotlighting the teams, athletes and cultures that defined sports fandom in 2025.
My flight had been delayed half a dozen times, my gate changed 10 minutes before boarding (only for boarding to be pushed back again), and the time was nearing 11 p.m. before I even stepped foot on a plane.
What seemed like a great idea at one point — going to Detroit for less than 36 hours, with just a single, airline-approved personal item containing little more than a Detroit Tigers jersey, all for a Tarik Skubal bobblehead — was becoming less and less attractive with every resigned announcement from the JetBlue gate attendant at LaGuardia.
What fortified me was the fact that I’d just watched Skubal take a perfect game into the sixth inning that very day. It was eventually broken up by the Texas Rangers’ Josh Smith, who hit a choppy single through the left side gap, but as with any Skubal start, it was just more confirmation that my Tigers have the best pitcher in baseball. He's a figurehead that Detroit fans can truly depend on every time he’s on the mound.
A bobblehead was the excuse, not the reason
Was it disappointing that the Tigers had (foolishly) scheduled his bobblehead giveaway on a day Skubal wasn’t even pitching? Yes. I was and will continue to be slightly miffed about it.
But I’ve always been an Enjoyer of Things, which is a nice way to say a low-grade hoarder. I like to squirrel and accumulate and, yes, hoard, and my baseball fandom has arguably been the worst possible thing (or maybe the best, depending on your persuasion) for that impulse. I have binders and boxes and drawers filled with baseball cards, and, by my last count, over 20 baseball-related hats.
The bobblehead bug hadn’t quite bitten me yet, but I figured there was no better place to start than with one of my favorite player, complete with a little Cy Young trophy to celebrate his 2024 win.
It was 1:30 in the morning by the time I landed in Detroit, and 2 a.m. by the time my brother had gotten me to my grandmother’s house in the suburbs. He’d kindly agreed to come down from East Lansing, pick me up from the airport, and go to the game with me. He’s not a baseball person, but I took him to his first ever game in the summer of 2021, and we were both on our feet when Miguel Cabrera hit a walk-off bloop single against the Twins.
Everyone has a reason for being there
Just over 12 hours later, I queued up in a line that already extended well past Comerica’s right field gate, three hours before first pitch. I had come all that way, so there was simply no world in which I was going to miss out on a bobblehead and wasn’t taking my chances with a sold-out crowd of 41,000 and only 15,000 Skubals to hand out.
I made friends with the people behind me in line, lifelong season ticket holders who were so excited about upgrading to seats behind home plate for the first time. We talked about Skubal’s start the previous day and how happy we were to see the Tigers doing so well after years of rebuilding. I’d forgotten Comerica’s bag policy, so they helped me stuff the contents of my tote into my pockets and hide the bag itself in the waistband of my jeans, behind my oversized Skubal home jersey. They calmed me down when I had a minor issue with the tickets from my resale app just a few minutes before gates opened.
Ninety minutes before first pitch, the line started to move. Five minutes and a security checkpoint later (no one asked me about my overstuffed pockets), I was clutching the successfully procured Skubal bobblehead to my chest like I was afraid someone could come and snatch it away from me at any moment. My brother and I sat up in the 300s on a beautiful day in early May in Detroit and settled in with fingers crossed for a Tigers win.
… and then we watched Jack Flaherty give up two home runs in the first inning, and then another in the second, and then another in the third.
Surprising to absolutely no one: the Tigers lost. It turned into a rout even after Flaherty was taken out: 10-3, Rangers, was the final score. I went home and prepared for an early bedtime; my flight back to New York was scheduled for 6 the next morning.
My Tigers lost badly. My favorite player didn’t pitch on his bobblehead day and I missed his excellent start by just a day. From wheels down to wheels up, I spent just 28.5 hours in Detroit.
And I had zero regrets.
How baseball sneaks into your life
It would be dishonest of me to call myself a lifelong baseball fan. My Michigan-based family kept some Tigers memorabilia lying around, I’ve generally known who Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander and Ty Cobb are (even if I couldn’t tell you what actually made them notable), and a game would occasionally be on in the background as I was growing up, but that was the extent of it.
I was 20 before I really started to fall in love with baseball, but when I fell, I fell hard. I went from not being able to tell you why they sometimes flip the “K” around on a stadium scoreboard to being the kind of person not only willing but happy to travel hundreds of miles just for a bobblehead.
A deserved amount of respect goes out to fans who have been living and dying by their teams for as long as they can remember, but some of the happiest moments in my adult life have happened because of baseball.
My favorite way to spend a summer evening is to sit in the 400s at Citi Field and watch the Mets (my home team away from home) with my friends, passing around a bag of peanuts and drinking one too many tallboys. In September, I gleefully invited the ire of Yankees fans with a trip out to the Bronx in full Tigers gear, to cheer obnoxiously as my team clobbered the so-called Bombers 12-2.
There’s so much joy in baseball’s little things. My new friends from the line at Comerica, who I later spotted on the Jumbotron in their seats behind the plate. The old-timers who show up to random weekday games, sit in spots that have been theirs for years, and manually score the game in scorebooks with frayed edges. Yelling myself hoarse to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and still managing to get the words wrong every time. Overpriced beer and chicken tenders. Being able to feel that you’re really a part of the city where you grew up or where you’re still doing a lot of growing up. Bobbleheads, baseball cards, caps.
My Skubal bobblehead is on my desk, not far from a one-out-of-five autographed Skubal card from a random box that I nearly cried over when I pulled, a gifted MLB ballparks bucket list water bottle, and a vintage Mets pennant. I don’t think of myself as a superstitious person, but when Skubal pitched Game 5 of the ALDS against the Mariners, I put his bobble on my coffee table, facing the TV, like it might speak a win into existence. I wore a “Tigers vs. Everybody” hat all day, because they’d made it past the Wild Card while I was wearing it.
There are moments when I feel like I love baseball so much that I might burst from it. All of the things that I squirrel, accumulate, and hoard are that love, externalized; refractions of my love in compact, aesthetically pleasing packages that are deserving of love in themselves.
The weekend after I flew to Detroit, I drove four hours up to Boston to go to Fenway for the first time, and took in a Red Sox game from directly behind one of those pesky Fenway poles. And I’d do it again. I’d go back to Detroit, a city that I love, on a random weekday and score the game by hand — even if it’s for even less than 28.5 hours — in a heartbeat. All for the love of the game.