Welcome back to Detroit Tigers baseball!
Typically we do this on Opening Day, but we had an awful lot of articles piling up, and this new fella, Scott Harris, won’t stop claiming or trading for role players! The final week running up to the opener is always hectic for us. Wrapping up season previews, getting our schedule together, doing podcasts and radio spots, and low-key prepping to repeat the process on a smaller scale for the beginning of the minor league season to follow.
So it seemed like a good idea to bump this to the traditional off day after Opening Day.
Bless You Boys is now over 15 years into its mission to bring you the best Tigers coverage and community possible. Things have changed a lot over the years. The site moved to Vox Media’s SB Nation platform when the Tigers were still in the afterglow of the mostly magical 2006 season, and I’m now the fourth managing editor in that period, following Ian Casselberry, Kurt Mensching, and Rob Rogacki.
What hasn’t changed, and this is a tribute to and the curse of a Detroit sports fan, is this fanbase’s desire to see the Detroit Tigers once again host the World Series trophy. Frankly, for the moment we’d be thrilled just to see consistent winning baseball again.
The mission at Bless You Boys is to provide a welcoming hangout for old and new fans alike to discuss the game and the Detroit Tigers specifically. The secondary mission remains to try and bridge the gap between traditional baseball knowledge and the modern era of sabermetrics and ever-evolving information warfare. Whether you’re relatively new to the fanbase or to baseball in general, or you have a complete memory box of classic Tigers teams of 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s, we’re thrilled to be able to bring you all together to support our team…and yeah probably also yell at them a bit.
So it’s time for one of our most venerable traditions: Our yearly introductions post where Bless You Boys writers, moderators, and readers introduce themselves and get a chance to meet and greet in the comments. Long-term friendships have been forged here over the years, but at the least, hopefully we’ll all come away with a better idea of the people and the fans behind the SB Nation usernames.
The thing that continues to keep me motivated to run the site and write about the Tigers, (I haven’t checked but I’m easily over three million words on the subject in nine seasons) is the community of smart, friendly, passionate fans that gather here. I’ve learned a lot from our readers and the discussions held in the comment threads over the years and met a lot of cool people. We’ll do our best to continue bringing you informative and insightful writing on all aspects of the team and baseball writ large, whatever this season may bring.
It’s a really interesting time to be a fan of the Detroit Tigers. The organization has entered a whole new era with the hiring of Scott Harris as the new President of Baseball Operations last September. With the proposed “rebuild” stalled out under former GM Al Avila, a change felt overdue. Really, since A.J. Hinch was hired as manager following the 2020 season, we’ve watched the Tigers embark on a full organizational renovation, and Harris’ arrival has only accelerated that process.
We look forward to covering it all for you in the years ahead.
So, I’d like to welcome you all back to a new season. Please read a bit about the site and the pretty simple rules for commenting here. It’s pretty easy. Vigorous debate is good. Personal attacks and tangents into other topics likely to derail the baseball discussion are not. Some of the moderation is now out of our hands with SB Nation’s new Coral commenting system, but the odds you’re going to run that far afoul are slim.
I’d also encourage everyone to check out the FanPost section where readers can post longer form thoughts in article form. Plenty of thoughtful pieces for discussion are produced there every year.
So let’s say hello, re-group from a lackluster Opening Day, and settle in for the season to come. Eat ‘em Tigers, eat ’em up!