What keeps families together these days?

For some, it’s being of Italian or German or Korean or insert-whatever-here lineage. For others, of the West Virginia persuasion, it’s coming from a long line of coal miners or a genetic absence of teeth. You get the idea. But my family’s a little different.

For my family, it’s the Detroit Tigers. A baseball team. And it’s a tradition that goes back a long, long time.

It started in the 1930s, when my maternal grandmother grew up as a rabid Tigers fan in suburban Detroit. In exchange for tickets to her first game at Tiger Stadium, she agreed to paint her father’s garage. She took her first trip into downtown Detroit to see her beloved Tigers play.

Forty years later, my mom took her then-boyfriend (future father of me, which I can say was his greatest work) to meet her parents. My dad, who had also grown up in Michigan and gone to his first baseball game at Tiger Stadium, was wearing his old Detroit cap that day.

Convinced that this was a ploy by my mother to make my dad seem more appealing, my grandmother challenged Dad to name the starting nine from the 1968 championship team to gain admittance to the house. In a moment of incredible clutch hitting, Dad was able to name them all and pass with flying colors.

In 1984 my parents got married. Two months after, the Tigers won the World Series.

When I came into being in 1991, one of my grandmother’s “Welcome to Earth” gifts was a complete set of baseball cards: the full ’91 Tigers roster.

My grandma Alice has been gone for 20 years now. Rickety Tiger Stadium has been replaced by a shiny new stadium with luxury boxes, a Jumbotron and even a carousel.

The Tiger tradition lives on strong in my family, though. Last year, my Dad and I made the pilgrimage back to Detroit to see the Tigers take on the Rangers in the American League Championship Series. We stood on the grass of the old Tiger Stadium site. We saw my grandmother’s house (it still stands) and saw the garage she painstakingly painted 70 years ago.

Though yes, it is “just a baseball team,” the story of my family is inextricably linked to the fate of the club. The Old English D that’s been emblazoned on their home whites for nearly a century — it’s something that serves as a constant reminder of where we came from. It’s something that keeps us together.

Though I’m living in Los Angeles now, 3,000 miles from home, my dad and I talk on the phone almost every day, talking (yelling, really) about some idiot relief pitcher or Miguel Cabrera’s hitting, or ironically named Prince Fielder’s utter lack of fielding ability. My mother’s been in touch with me constantly, asking for updates on the Detroit’s magical playoff run.

Tuesday, the Tigers will play in Game 1 of the 2012 World Series, going for their first title since my parents tied the knot 28 years ago.

Needless to say, it’s an exciting time for the Slacks. The team is part of who we are. It’s a piece of our history. We don’t have a shared ethnic heritage. We don’t have a connection to a particular region or religion. What we have is a certain storied baseball club, one that’s been present in all our lives for almost a century. That’s tradition. Maybe not the most traditional one, but one that we all share. It’s what makes us, well, us.

Go Tigers.

Kevin Slack is a senior television, radio and film major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at khslack@syr.edu.

Published on October 23, 2012 at 2:59 am