On a brutal Tigers' loss in Angels opener and fandom's hope-devastation cycle

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To borrow a phrase from English football fans: It's the hope that kills you.

Jason Benetti and Andy Dirks, on the call for Tuesday night's Tigers-Angels opener, said something of the kind after Will Vest yielded a go-ahead grand slam to Vaughn Grissom in the eighth. They were both sort of exasperated, and understandably so.

Tigers fans don't have to catch every game, or we can turn it off or leave if things go south, but Benetti, Dirks, and the rest of the Tigers' broadcast team don't have that luxury. They've had to watch and comment on every little detail of this absolutely mortifying slide that has landed the Tigers not only in the basement of the AL Central, but of all of baseball.

After the grand slam, Dirks said something like (and I may be taking some poetic license here), "You think the clouds are parting, and then something happens that just takes all of the sunshine away."

In other words, it's the hope that kills you.

Tyler Holton went on to give up a solo homer in the ninth, extending the Angels' lead 10-6. But still there was hope. The Tigers had loaded the bases once in the fifth and were able to score a go-ahead run on a Jahmai Jones single, but then Spencer Torkelson struck out to reemphasize an ugly career trend. He was a career 3-for-33 with bases loaded going into this game. Now he's 3-for-34. Zach McKinstry struck out, then Hao-Yu Lee flew out.

But what if, when the chips were down and all hope seemed lost in the ninth, the Tigers could get a do-over? What if they could load the bases again, and someone — anyone — could finally step up in the big moment?

I know how the Tigers have been playing. I know where they sit in the standings. I consider myself a rather pessimistic person. And still, I had hope that the good guys might win.

After a Dillon Dingler leadoff walk in the bottom of the ninth, Riley Greene, Jones, and then Torkelson went down in order to end the game.

As Benetti pointed out, we are now over a third of the way through the season. If the Tigers want to stay in it, they don't just need to be better through the rest of the year, they need to be good. They might even need to be great. As they are right now, they've offered no indication that they'll be able to do that.

But baseball would be nothing without hope. Hoping against hope is what makes a fan a true fan. Even if you rage quit and turned the game off after the grand slam, you — just the same as I — will be back tomorrow, hoping that the Tigers win a baseball game.

Do they deserve it? Is this cycle of hope-devastation-hope-devastation kind of unhealthy? Maybe no, and probably yes. There will be fatalism (there's always fatalism as a Tigers fan); there will be more moments like Tuesday night, when everything that's bad just gets worse.

But we'll be back tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on, always hanging onto the very brief moments when the clouds give way to the sun. All we can do is hope that the hope pays off at some point. It just has to, right? Right?

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