Local author's Detroit Tigers book delves into team's history

Roger Yoder has always been a stats guy.

From his first trip to Tiger Stadium as a little league baseball player in Hillsdale County’s Jerome Township, Yoder has been fascinated by baseball statistics and how you can relive a game through a box score.

As an adult, he’s parlayed that love into a book. Yoder's self-published a book, “Detroit Tigers: Michigan’s Favorite Sports Team,” was released in 2022 and has received recognition and international book honors. He’s already onto his next project, one about the New York Yankees.

“I wanted to do a comprehensive book about the Tigers franchise,” Yoder said. “A lot of books just focus on the major league ballplayers, the Tigers. This book gets into covering the franchise as a whole – the scouts, the broadcasters, the owners, the stadiums, even the umpires. It’s a good source for any Tiger fan no matter what their knowledge level.”

The 500-page book includes stories of individual games and ballplayers, from Ty Cobb to Justin Verlander. He focuses on the World Series championships and pennant winners from Tigers history and has special notes about players who have a Michigan connection, such as Adrian native Mike Marshall, the American League Cy Young winner in 1974 while with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Yoder said he knew of Marshall by following his name in box scores and baseball stats but didn’t know he grew up about 40 miles from Marshall until later in life.

“His rookie year was phenomenal for the Tigers,” Yoder said. “It was incredible. He had some incredible stretches there where he was pitching lights out. I wish he would have stayed with the Tigers, but if he had, my favorite Tiger, John Hiller, probably would never have been a Tiger.”

Another unique discovery is that three Detroit Tiger owners in a row – Frank Navin, Fred Knorr and Thomas Monaghan – had ties to this part of the state.

Navin was born in Adrian in 1871 and would become part-owner of the Tigers from 1908 to 1919 and principal owner from 1919-35. Knorr, who went to Hillsdale College, owned the Tigers with John Fetzer from 1956 until he died in 1960. Monaghan, from Jackson, bought the team from Fetzer in 1983, the fall before the Tigers won the 1984 World Series.

“Navin brought Ty Cobb to the Tigers and Hugh Jennings,” Yoder said. “He acquired Mickey Cochrane, who became the manager who won pennants in 1934 and 1935.

“You had three owners in a row from this area. As a kid growing up as a Tiger fan, I had no idea the local connections.”

After high school, Yoder joined the military, serving in the U.S. Navy for 20 years. During that time, he was a sports radio broadcaster on the ship he was assigned. Back home, he wrote sports articles for The Hillsdale Daily News, Jackson Citizen-Patriot, and The Daily Telegram in 1980s.

It was while gathering box scores after games that he got the idea for a Tigers book.

“I liked to include statistics in my articles,” Yoder said. “I think they add to the story. A person can relive the game through stats. Anytime I’d be doing a story about the Tigers and I was deadline, I would go to six or seven different sources looking for information. I was on a deadline, and I didn’t have that kind of time. I realized there should be a Tiger book, more of an encyclopedia.”

The book includes sections on the Tiger Hall of Famers, award winners, yearly team reviews and a segment on the all-time top 10 position players and pitchers in franchise history.

“It seems baseball is more driven by stats than any other sport,” he said.

The stats he includes in the book aren’t just the stats that were available when he was growing up. He is up to date with baseball sabermetrics.

“It’s interesting,” Yoder said. “I’m going through player logs and game logs. There is more to a franchise than just Ty Cobb or Al Kaline. There is so much history this book covers.”

Yoder still lives in Jerome. He dedicated the book in memory of Landon Hall, an Addison student who was a classmate of his daughter, Caroline, who died in 2018.

“We were in the Philippines when Caroline found out he had died,” Yoder said. “We felt totally helpless as here we were on the other side of the world and could not attend a memorial or funeral service. Dedicating the book in his memory and placing that in bold on the front cover means more to me than anything else.”

His son, Mark, was an Addison graduate and Caroline will be a senior this fall.

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Southeast Michigan has a big connection to the Tigers with numerous players coming from both Monroe and Lenawee counties to have been drafted or played in the Tigers organization or with the Tigers themselves.

Britton native Duane Below was the most recent, having pitched for the Tigers in 2011 and 2012. In 2012, Below won two of the first three games of the season for Detroit.

Yoder, a 1978 North Adams-Jerome graduate even uncovered a local connection to his high school.

“There were a couple of players (John M. Williams and Bob Duncan) from my high school who played in the minor leagues for the Tigers,” he said. “Of course, I put that in the book.”

In May, the book was named a Readers’ Favorite with a five-star rating, and in June Yoder learned the book was a finalist in the sports category of the 2023 International Book Awards contest. Anyone interested in ordering the book can visit the Detroit Tigers Book: Roger Yoder Facebook page or call 517-530-1903.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jerome author's Detroit Tigers book delves into team's history