DETROIT – Dan Dickerson has been in the booth for the Tigers for 20 years, but right now, he’s at home like everyone else.
“It’s nice to talk sports because we all miss it don’t, we?” Dan Dickerson asked.
Answer: yes. We all do.
Most of us are wondering when it might return. Dickerson doesn’t know about a timetable, but his hunch is baseball will be back at least for a shortened season.
“They have to know that when the players come back, they are going into an environment where everyone has tested negative,” Dickerson said. “That it’s a safe environment and when they leave the ballpark, I don’t picture a quarantine situation, but everyone practices social distancing like we have for last seven weeks.”
An 80-game season is a lot different than a full season. Dickerson said he’s not sure how the minor league system would work, which could mean the young stars are up in the Big League sometime this year.
“Mize, Manning and Skubal, the big three, they’ve all got stuff,” Dickerson said. “They’re going to help this team sooner rather than later. Also, Riley Greene, he had 19 plate appearances and wasn’t over awed by anything.”
Dickerson is quarantines at home with his wife and two grown kids, a son and a daughter. He calls it bonus time with his favorite people.
“It’s time I never would have gotten otherwise,” he said.
Dickerson also talked about Mr. Tiger. He said the Hall of Famer was ever-present at the ballpark. He took his role as Special Assistant very seriously.
“He would go down to the clubhouse almost every day and chat with player,” Dickerson said of Al Kaline. “He wanted to let them know he was there. I think it was gratifying to him in recent years that younger players were taking advantage of a Hall of Famer sitting right there. They would talk life and baseball. He didn’t miss a thing.”
Dickerson believes that Kaline will be memorialized the way he deserves when we can all gather together again.
Here’s to hoping that’s sooner rather than later so we all can hear that familiar voice soon.
“Oh, when I go back, I might say something like, ‘cloudy, breezy and warm in downtown Detroit. It’s game two of this series, Matthew Boyd going for 13th win of the year.’ Something like that,” Dickerson said.
We can’t wait.