I downloaded a dozen or so different versions of Terry Cashman's "Talkin' Baseball" the other day, and for some reason, the one that seems the most poignant to me is the one he wrote about the Detroit Tigers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laY2-I9fi8s

I've never really been a Tiger fan, although I remember sitting on my grandfather's porch in the '60s as he listened to Ernie Harwell broadcast the Tiger games on WJR. My grandfather lived in North Central Ohio, but he had long since grown disgusted with his hometown Cleveland Indians. He took great pride in the fact that Detroit's Gates Brown, perhaps baseball's premier pinch-hitter at the time, was from the same small town he had grown up in.

I know he was happy when the Tigers won the World Series in 1968, but it isn't just my long-dead grandfather who makes me feel sad about Detriot.

When I was a kid in the '50s and a teenager in the '60s, Detroit was as good an example as any city of the American can-do spirit. It was the place where they built the best cars in the world, those big-old wonderful boats that carried the big families of the Baby Boom from place to place. It was also Motown, the place where all that amazing music that raised the consciousness of millions of white kids in the '60s.

But Detroit went into a decline, starting with the riots in 1968 and heading through the gas price shocks of the '70s. All of a sudden, the big cars we had been driving didn't make much sense, and Detroit didn't want to make small cars.

In 1950, nearly 1.85 million people lived in <a title="Detroit" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit" target="_self">Detroit</a>. As of 2009, the number was less than half that. It's as good an example as any of the decline in America's old Rust Belt manufacturing cities. So when I hear Terry Cashman singing about "the Motor City team," I find myself sadder for the city that no longer exists than for its old-time teams.