This weekend is the eighth anniversary of the Tigers’ official rebirth as a baseball franchise.
Early in the afternoon of Feb. 4, 2004, Pudge Rodriguez and Mike Ilitch each stepped into the Tigers Club at Comerica Park following an improbable romance that made baseball’s best-known catcher property of the worst team in big league baseball.
An almost-bizarre free-agent signing sprouted only four months after the Tigers had missed by one game tying the 1962 Mets for the ignominious distinction of having lost 120 games in a season.
A year later, Magglio Ordonez joined the Tigers. Attendance surged. The team began to compete. And in 2006, the Tigers bagged the greatest three-year turnaround in baseball history, winning 95 games and cracking the World Series.
There have been monster signings since — Miguel Cabrera ($154 million), Justin Verlander ($80 million) — that led 10 days ago to the greatest splash of big bucks on a star athlete in Detroit history: Prince Fielder’s federal-reserve-sized package totaling $214 million.
via Mike Ilitch putting money where Tigers heart is | The Detroit News | detroitnews.com.