Tigers beat writer mystery solved after hilarious honeymoon story surfaces

The Tigers are now a week into the playoffs and have brought October baseball back to Detroit for the first time in a decade. Much of this still feels like a fever dream. The Tigers' impossible August and September sprint to AL's No. 6 seed, and then their two-game sweep of the Astros to advance to the ALDS has been the stuff of legends. The odds were 99.8% against Detroit in early August, and although they're still very much the underdogs of the entire DS crop, they have the best story of any of them.

One familiar voice has been conspicuously absent from the incredible surge, however. Tigers writers Chris McCosky of The Detroit News, Cody Stavenhagen of The Athletic, Evan Woodbery of MLive, and Jason Beck of MLB.com have all been faithfully on their beats, but Evan Petzold of The Detroit Free Press has been dormant since Oct. 1.

The Freep has published a few different bylines in his absence, including a notably bad column from author Mitch Albom after Game 1 of the ALDS, but what gives? Where's Petzold?

Turns out, he weighed his options back in early August (Aug. 10, to be exact, the day before everything started to change for Detroit), and polled his fellow beat writers: should he book his honeymoon for October or would the Tigers do the impossible? According to Petzold, McCosky, Stavenhagen, and Co. came back with a resounding "no," the Tigers would not be in the postseason.

Oops.

Detroit Free Press writer Evan Petzold has a very good excuse for being absent from the Tigers' beat during magical playoff run

Petzold explained that he'd been married over a year ago, in September 2023, but he and his wife decided to delay their honeymoon as they settled the matter of buying a house first. Back in August of this year, when the Tigers were 55-63, they decided it would be safe to take a nice October vacation to Greece for a proper honeymoon and also to commemorate their one-year wedding anniversary.

No one can blame the Petzolds for betting that the Tigers weren't going to see October. At that point, fans just wanted to see Detroit finish with a solid .500 record, and even that felt like a little too much to ask.

Petzold said, "And well, Chris McCosky, I did it. And Cody Stavenhagen, I did it. And, you know, Jason Beck, I did it. Evan Woodbery, I did it. You guys all told me that I should. And I did it. So I blame you. I'm just kidding about that. But yeah, it's interesting how it worked out."

Hopefully, Petzold isn't checking the real-time scores too much while he's trying to enjoy himself overseas, and hopefully the Tigers go deep enough into this thing that he'll be able to cover to end of it.