Beautiful Losers? Not These Bums

By Joel Stein

The problem isn't that the Detroit Tigers are about to become the losingest team in modern major league history. The problem is that they're doing it wrong. The 1962 Mets, whose 40-120 record is likely to be eclipsed by Detroit this week, were lovable losers. They were a brand-new expansion team with, in those pre-Toronto Raptors days, the dumbest team name ever conceived. Not only did the Mets have a mascot that was just a baseball with a face drawn on it, but they named the mascot Mr. Met. Everyone knew the Mets were going to stink, they knew they were going to stink, and they stank with wild abandon. Despite the losses, they ranked sixth in attendance that year. They were all ridiculous fun, the UPN of their time, and they pitched like they were pitching the premise for Homeboys in Outer Space.

But the Tigers are in complete denial. They are trudging through their ineptitude without a sly wink, convinced they are getting Jobed every night. But unless they pull off a miracle in the next week, they will have the most losses in modern major league history. They were statistically eliminated from winning their division on Aug. 22. And that's the American League Central, a division most people don't even know exists. Their owner has decided the team is so uninteresting that he's spending more money on the payroll of his hockey team, which plays a sport most people don't know exists.

The Tigers' sole nod to their lameness was hiring Mike Veeck, the son of Bill Veeck, the Hall of Fame owner who organized the disco-album bonfire at Comiskey Park in the '70s, to do their promotions. So they did have Duct Tape Night, Magic Night with illusionist Aaron Radatz, a Christian concert after an Angels game and Baseball Card Blitz, where kids under 15 got to trample one another on a field littered with 50,000 packs of baseball cards. But Veeck didn't go far enough. First of all, he should have removed the Tigers from those baseball-card packs. And he should have replaced the entire lineup with Tiger look-alike midgets, signed Rickey Henderson, put patches of the still living Al Kaline on their sleeves and accidentally blown a water main in their lame new ballpark so the team could have finished the season in its original home, Tiger Stadium.

But the real problem is that Veeck's attitude didn't trickle down to the young, boring, serious team with its radio-face manager, Alan Trammell. Unlike the 1962 Mets, who had "Choo Choo" Coleman and "Don" Zimmer, the Tigers don't have one player with a decent nickname. Trammell refuses to talk about the Mets' record 120 losses, telling a TIME reporter much gutsier than I am, "I'm not going to answer that question." Not that the reporter was brave for asking Trammell but for sitting through the entire game.

What no one on the team understands is that being oblivious to how you are perceived is the easiest path to unlikability. The lovable loser knows he's hopelessly flailing, while the plain old loser keeps up the ugly charade. And although ignoring reality may seem dignified, it's really like Michael Dukakis' riding in the tank and thinking it made him look like a warrior. The lovable loser has more dignity because he keeps going despite his awareness of futility: he knows it's stupid to raise taxes and not lose every state except Minnesota, to try to kick the football while Lucy's holding it, to think dropping the AOL part from his name will fool anybody--but he tries anyway.

What the Tigers also don't understand is that no one is disgusted by losing. If they did understand that, they wouldn't try to pretend it wasn't happening. There are 30 teams in baseball, and each year the 29 of them that are not the Yankees lose. The Boston Red Sox, who haven't won a World Series since 1918, aren't losers, because they play for the love of the game. I'm just kidding; the Red Sox are total losers. But even the Yankees aren't World Series champions in almost 75% of their seasons. Life is mostly losing. It's a series of imperfect essays full of jokes that don't quite work, of dreams that go unfulfilled, of passions that dwindle and ultimately, death. And if you don't figure out how to strive with the acceptance of guaranteed failure, how to find fulfillment in the eternal recurrence of imperfection, then you can have a brand-new stadium with a Ferris wheel, and no one is going to come. I'm rooting for the Tigers to win because they don't deserve to lose.