Who's Your Tiger?

As long as I can remember the Tigers have had pretty terrible ad campaigns to promote their product on the field. The most memorable of these ads (and if you remember things like old Tigers T.V. commercials you are probably some kind of obsessive nerd who hasn't been on a date in months, downloads Hentai and uses your two Netflix rentals on Akira and Videodrome respectively...wait, I just described myself and I still have the nerve to complain about being to busy to update this site) were the ones which aired during the historically bad 2003 season. These commercials featured new manager Alan Trammell donning a pair of shades while wearing a no-nonsense expression and walking around the bowels of Comerica Park banging on doors with baseball bats as the rest of the coaching staff (Lance Parrish and Kirk Gibson) emerged from smoke-filled rooms wearing the same style sunglasses and growling things like "It's go time." These commercials were outrageous on several levels but namely for the fact that Trammell has the friendliest disposition of any player/manager ever and casting him in the role of a bad-ass totalitarian who wore a necklace made of Barbaro Garbey's teeth would be the equivalent of going to a production of King Lear and finding out that Jean-Claude Van Damme had been cast in the lead role (when everyone knows he would be perfectly suited for the part of Edmund...that noise you just heard was my entire readership leaving my site en masse at that tortured attempt at a joke...snobs.)

In 2004 the Tigers switched directions and went with a lighthearted comedic ad campaign that had a theme like "Know Your Tigers" or something equally as lame. These ads featured new editions Rondell White and Carlos Guillen playing catch with some guy and his dog by throwing the chew toy around the horn and Dmitri Young and Eric Munson crashing some kids birthday party and exploding the pinata with a homerun swing. In the latter ad I was always troubled by how eerily subdued the children were at the fact that a large crackhead looking baseball-bat wielding man had just emerged from the shrubs and destroyed their party game. Had this occurred at a party I was at as a child I would have turned around screaming and ran up the nearest tree but I guess that's just because I'm a racist. (I'm kidding about being racist, I may be a lot of things, polygamist, xenophobic, communist but I am definitely not racist.)

Anyways the 2004 ads were as forgettable as they were retarded and in 2005 the Tigers unveiled what may be my least favorite thing in the history of....ever. The Who's Your Tiger? ad campaign. The first incarnation featured children saying cutesy things like "Pudge is my Tiger because I play catcher too" or, "Dmitri Young's my Tiger because I saw Daddy choke Mommy last night." (Jesus I don't know why I'm so bitter.....wait I listed all the reasons above, that's right). However, after the first few ads the commercials abandoned the child narration and instead went with a formula where a narrator spouts an assortment of statements consisting of trivia (100 game errorless streak at 2nd base), useless statistics (batted .330 in day games in May) and corny nicknames (Polly) with the inflection of asking a question before smugly revealing "Then your Tiger is Placido Polanco." (No shit, jerkbag). I think one of the ways to make this ad campaign slightly less hateable would be if they expanded the breadth of players featured as over the past few seasons these commercials have been reserved for the stars of the team and Chris Shelton. So I'm taking up the cause of promoting some of the less popular and unfamiliar members of the team using the formula for the ads as I outlined above. Just to get the ball rolling on this idea and as a service to the p.r. department and the fans I've decided to take the time to create a "Who's Your Tiger" ads for these players beginning with...

"Does your Tiger have an ERA a shade under 6.00, is unilaterally scorned by the entire fan base and has a repertoire consisting of a straight-as-an-arrow 95 MPH fastball and a curve that breaks belt high and over the heart of the plate like it's sitting on a tee for the hitter?"

"Does your Tiger go by the nickname "Cheese Man" presumably because he doesn't wash the gel out of his hair for weeks at a time leaving his scalp smelling like Limburger that was drug under the radiator by a dying rat and does he make your heart sink and stomach churn with a sense of impending doom every time he enters to pitch in a close game?"

"Does your Tiger's appearances usually end with him staring at the dugout floor with his head in his hands after giving up the lead and is his father a former Tigers pitcher whose career could best be described as being the Jason Grilli of the late 70's."

"Then your Tiger is Jason Grilli and I hate you."