By Bob Becker

guest columnist

Former Detroit Tigers’ manager Sparky Anderson might not have been an expert in grammar and syntax, but the guy was always able to get his point across.

We were sitting in the third base dugout at Old Tiger’s stadium a couple of years ago, contemplating the closing days of the regular season. The Tigers were not going to make the playoffs. In fact, they had hit their “magic number” sometime in late July that year, and just played out their string for the final nine weeks.

“Hey Skip, glad to put this one behind you?” I asked. He looked at me as if I had two heads.

“No man,” he said. “Nobody wins nuthin’ all the time. This was just one season and it was our turn. We’ll be back.

“That don’t change things. I love baseball, but I love football and basketball and golf and all them other sports. And it just don’t get no better than this time of year.”

My man Sparky was right on both counts. The Tigers have come back, and it really “don’t get no better than this time of year”.

Pro football is in full swing, and the Lions have more wins that they’ve had in the past 13 months.  The

Pistons will be in Grand Rapids next week, and the Red Wings are set for another Stanley Cup race. Tiger just banked $10 million for having pro golf’s best season…big surprise…while gear-heads aren’t finished talking about NASCAR.

And once again Michigan State’s football fans are wondering where their season went. Thank God for Tom Izzo!

You can make an argument for any sport being your favorite.

It is hard to compare anything with the color or pageantry of big-time college football,  and pro football features the best of the best.

I’m not a big fan of pro basketball because it seems as if the more money a guy makes, the less he is required to play by the rules. Next time you watch an NBA game, see how many steps a guard takes driving the lane.  And when the coach barks from the bench “D up!”, everybody grabs everybody else’s jersey.

Hockey would be better if they’d score every once in awhile, and if I had a buck for every time a guy missing his front teeth said “Good game, eh?” to me in an NHL locker room I’d be a rich man.

I love Tiger because he’s the only guy in pro sports who can show up at an event and drive the rest of the field to see if they can get into that week’s Hooter’s Tour event somewhere else.  Anywhere else.

But I have this evil streak buried deep inside me that breaks out every October when Major League Baseball begins its annual rite of picking teams for the World Series.

Used to be two leagues, no playoffs and afternoon World Series games that forced us to try to smuggle radios into our classrooms decades before anybody thought of inventing ear buds. If you told the teacher you didn’t feel good he’d tell you to put your head down on your desk and rest. Those little hand-held’s fit right into the crook of your arm, and you could get away with it if you kept the volume down.
And the girl in the next row didn’t rat you out.

I’m not particularly concerned about who actually makes it into the World Series, though it would be nice if the Tigers were there. Most people root for favorite teams. Assistant track coach Paul Kouts, for example, is a St. Louis Cardinal fan who tends to whine when the Red Birds lose…which is fairly often.

 Personally, I don’t want the Cardinals in the Series, even if it would take till next April for Paul to get over it. I don’t want the Dodgers in the series either. Or Tampa Bay, Oakland, Toronto, Florida, Houston, San Diego or Arizona.

If you play in a warm-weather locale, or inside a domed stadium, then I want you to have the bats and balls packed away by mid-October.

My “perfect” Series would involve Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, Colorado or Milwaukee.
Any combination.

Why? Because we are now into October, the playoffs stretch almost into November. It gives me a perverse pleasure to watch guys making a bazillion dollars trying to play baseball in a blizzard.

Forget batting gloves, I want to see those big, thick mittens. Plus ear muffs under the batting helmets and turtle neck Under Armor so think they can hardly move.

I want to see smoke coming from their mouths every time they take a breath, I want to see guys in the dugout wrapped up like mummies and jumping up and down to keep warm, and I want to see hitters feel that tingle in their hands when they apply a frozen bat to a frozen ball.

And best of all, I like to watch it while sitting in my easy chair with the fire place going, knowing that for at least two hours, those over-paid so-and-so’s  were wishing they could change places with me, rather than the other way around.

That’s when Sparky Anderson’s lyrical pronunciation really hits home: Things truly don’t get no better than that!