"I shouldn't have spent so much," the 60-ish woman in a black wool coat confides guiltily. "I can't really afford it right now. But my sons and grandkids are so excited about the Tigers, and they like it when Grandma Gee gives them presents."
Actually, the Tigers are the ones who have given their fans and the entire state of Michigan a present this summer. Their shocking emergence as a winner, and perhaps champion, after more than a decade as a punchline has served as a giant anti-depressant for a region decimated by the unexpected implosion of the car-making business.
Yes, it's just a game, played by
nonresidents who probably drive foreign roadsters. But don't write off the Tigers as merely something to talk about while standing in the unemployment line. The emotional lift of a pennant race and a World Series has become a daily dose of sunshine amid a city consumed by gloom.
"I don't read the paper anymore. It's all layoffs and buyouts and plant closings," said Floyd Dybkienticz, standing outside the Baltimore Lunch restaurant, just three blocks from Comerica Park. "But I read the sports section every day, because of the Tigers."
Here's what he's missing on the front page: Hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs in the past five years, and with Michigan-made cars' market-share still plunging, many more layoffs have already been announced. At Ford Motors alone, 75,000 wage-earners and 14,000 white-collar employees have been offered lump-sum buyouts to give up their jobs and walk away. A 13.8 percent unemployment rate, three times the national average, has forced thousands of life-long Detroit residents to flee Michigan in search of jobs elsewhere, further eroding the tax base. In the nation's poorest major city, one in three people live in poverty, and several neighborhoods have been abandoned, left with boarded-up buildings and trash-strewn vacant lots.
"We are Exhibit A of a depressed economy. We are the poster child," said Neal Rubin, metro columnist for the Detroit News. "The auto companies are bleeding, and everyone feels the pain. . . . The housing market is so bad now, for instance. [In] areas where you once could barely get your for-sale sign pounded into lawn before it sold, [houses] now are on the market for months and months."
And worst of all is the uncertainty. "When the car companies announce 40,000 layoffs, it's not like 40,000 people just don't show up on Monday," Rubin points out. "These are layoffs over the next six months or a year, which means there are 200,000 people wondering if it's going to be them."
Parsons says the stress from worrying about earning a paycheck "just eats at you. My sons have seven kids between them, and they don't know yet how they're going to support their families." Her two sons and a stepson accepted buyouts from Ford over the summer, but now are undecided about what to do for a living. They initially talked about becoming auto mechanics, and the two brothers are now are considering pooling their buyout money to buy a small pizza restaurant in their suburban neighborhood.
"But they don't know anything about running a pizza parlor," Parsons says, her face creased with worry. "They're betting everything they have on it."
Their escape from the financial pressure, like that of thousands of their neighbors, has come courtesy of Jim Leyland, Magglio Ordonez and Kenny Rogers. The Tigers' sudden renaissance has occurred at an opportune moment.
"I don't know what it is about baseball, but the team has become this great distraction from all the hardship," says Jennifer Hammond, a reporter for TV station WJBK and a lifelong Detroit resident. "You see all the people going through tough times - well, this has been a little bit of a tonic to take your mind off it."
"It's been a six-month-long conversation starter," Rubin said. "There's almost no such thing as a stranger at this point, because everybody wants to talk about the Tigers."
Leslie Hill, a volunteer at her church in suburban Dearborn, attended a planning meeting in the chapel basement earlier this month. When the Tigers-Yankees game began, she said, "we all agreed to just conduct business between innings. Nobody would pay attention when the game was on."
Rubin was at a charity fundraiser during Game 4 of the American League Championship Series, amid a crowd of tuxedos and ballgowns, "swells who paid $200 a ticket," he said. By the ninth inning, "everyone said, 'The heck with this' - we were all crowded around a small TV set in the security tent outside."
And soon, the entire city erupted in celebration, as Ordonez's game-winning home run sailed into the left-field stands. "You could hear people cheering up and down my street," Dybkienticz said. "Everybody is smiling. . . . People [are] hurting, and people are angry. But everybody loves the Tigers."
pmiller@sltrib.com
