Brandon fucking Inge is a fucking MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL ALL-STAR.

Let that one sink in for a minute, bitches.

You remember when Inge was a young dude? The little man in the catcher’s gear that looked like he stumbled in from a church league game somewhere? Backstopping the ace Tiger’s staff to 119 losses, a billion walks, and lots of laughs? Yeah, that fucking guy is a fucking All-Star.

See, in America, dreams still come true. No matter how hard that socialist Obama tries to spread our dreams among the masses or how many times those capitalist dogs in the Republican Party try to give them the chair, our dreams dream on. I had a dream once that Brandon Inge was actually a collection of 16 bit sprites that escaped from a Super Famicom game about schoolgirl-raping-leprechauns with tentacle arms. He probably dreamed about being an All-Star, and since he worked to make his reality (I passed up the video game design course at Everest Institute to study philosophy at Gudger College) now he is going to go out and live it.

While I’m sitting at home drinking tap water and trying to picture my living room walls a different shade of white, Inge will be warming up at historic Busch Stadium. He’ll stand on the sidelines and fidget awkwardly while some chick warbles through the National Anthem and a bunch of jets fly around. Then he’s gonna chill on the bench, give the rest of the AL some grit-tips (always keep some spare dirt in the dugout to touch up dirtless patches on your knees in a pinch), and watch the best players in the world “compete” for (wait, this can’t be right … oh … I’ll be damned) home field advantage in the World Series. Sometime around the 8th inning, Inge will be in the sweepstakes to not be the token dude they leave on the bench just in case, and hopefully he’ll get to pinch run for a winded fat guy or, maybe, take some swings against a mediocre reliever serving as his teams lone representative.

There’s a lot of reasons Tigers fan love Inge — he’s white, he’s scrappy, he lives in Dexter, he is pretty solid — but I think a lot of us love him because he’s the last surviving link to those teams in the early-00’s that are burned in our memory. I was convinced that nobody from the team Dombrowski took over in 2002 would be a piece of the far-off next winning Tigers team. And that was mostly correct except for Inge. The 06 World Series (appearing) team was a collection of new faces put together over the past couple seasons. But the fact Inge, the longest tenured Tiger even then, held on as one little piece of the terrible terrible past was comforting. It was nice to know someone survived the prison camp created by Randy Smith and got to emerge with a chance to win the World Series.

Congratulations, you son of a bitch. Didn’t see this coming in 2001.