Shortly after rifle shots wounded former President Donald Trump and killed one of his fans in July at a Pennsylvania rally, the Republican Party held its national convention in Milwaukee to nominate Trump again with Senator JD Vance as his running mate. One of the creepiest moments in Vance’s awkward acceptance speech came when Vance smiled wistfully and recalled what they found in the house of his grandmother after she died. She’d raised him in Ohio.

When playground director Gene Kelty umpired softball games at Hansen Field in the 1960s, he left no doubt about the location of a good pitch. “Stee-RIKE!” he’d call in a voice that carried across the street on Drexel and off the brick walls of St. Martin of Tours church, school, convent, and rectory in Detroit’s southeast corner. “Stee-RIKE!!” Kelty’s voice kept echoing off all those brick houses bordering the playground on Piper, Avondale, and Averhill Court in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood.

Literally and figuratively, Mallory McMorrow of Michigan threw the book at former Republican president Donald Trump at the Democratic National convention in Chicago last week. Thump! It bumped atop the lectern on the podium when she slammed it down.

Fret not about improving the hitting, pitching, fielding, and payroll of the mediocre Detroit Tigers. Oh, no. Instead, the Ilitch ownership is about to give Motor City baseball fans what they really want and need: Luxury seating and a private club around home plate at Comerica Park so fat cats can pay big bucks for better boxes.

In law school at Yale, Senator JD Vance of Ohio organized study sessions with classmates to examine “Social Decline in America.” His fellow scholars served as a de facto focus group for his hit book Hillbilly Elegy. One reading assignment Vance ordered was a lengthy essay in The Nation that was published in the mid-1930s about migration of poor, white people from the Southern states to the Motor City to work in the momentarily revived automobile factories during the Great Depression. It was titled “The Hill-Billies Come to Detroit.”

At the mature, old age of 72, the Oxford-schooled Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana is far too wise, much too educated, and way too refined to run his fat mouth like some cocky young punk. But the sharp-tongued Republican chose to do just this last week with personal insults about Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States and the Democratic candidate for president against former President Donald Trump, Kennedy’s fellow Republican. If elected, she would become the first female president and the second of color.

The ride from downtown Detroit to Metro Airport was perfect. The big bus left on time. It arrived on time.

By accepting the figurative gold watch of retirement and dropping his reelection bid Sunday, President Joe Biden gave his Democratic Party a powerful chance in November’s election to not only sweep government leadership at the federal level but also to win big in local races around the 50 states. Such a wave could be led by his obvious replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, who might become both the first female chief executive and the second person of color to win the White House. Against former Republican President Donald Trump, the former prosecutor Harris would oppose a convicted felon and a bellicose bully who is a proud, racist, sexist, white man with issues of impulse control and ego.

It was Sunday morning on Fox News Channel, so it was time for a sermon. It was delivered by Rachel Campos-Duffy, one of several anchors on the early show discussing the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump on Saturday evening in Butler, Pennsylvania. “He is under a special protection,” she said, “because of the millions of people who have been praying for him and praying to Jesus, praying to the angels, praying to the Holy Spirit, to put a shield around him.”

For a change, Rachel Maddow got quickly to the point. Early in her interview with sex-film performer Stormy Daniels, the often garrulous MSNBC anchor asked Daniels about her tryst with former President Donald Trump and the aftermath of her testimony against Trump in his recent New York trial. “My mailbox was destroyed,” Daniels told Maddow.

When they took the kids to the splash pad that hot mid-June day, the grownups of Oakland County didn’t expect the splash to come from bullets that drew blood. But that’s just what happened in Rochester Hills when a paranoid man who owned an arsenal of weapons opened fire with one of them at the water park. He wounded nine people before dropping that gun and heading home with another gun to kill himself.

When she entered the United States House of Representatives, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Detroit famously vowed to remove then-President Donald Trump. “We’re going to impeach the mother-fucker,” Tlaib promised in 2019. Indeed, Democrats in the House did so twice, but failed both times to win enough Republican Senate votes to convict Trump and ban him for life from the office he is now trying to re-capture.

Two summers ago, I lunched with author Bill Morris in Lower Manhattan at a place called “Paul’s Da Burger Joint.” Although long a resident of New York City, Morris grew up in suburban Detroit and never forgot his roots. Among them is to root, root, root for the Detroit Lions, and Morris told me then he wanted to write a book about more than a half-century of ineptitude and heartbreak from a team its own depressed fans scornfully called the “Same Old Lions.” “My original idea was to write a story about futility,” Morris said recently.

The story in The Washington Post last week said Negro Leagues statistics are now officially recognized by Major League Baseball. It was illustrated with a photograph of a bronze statue of Josh Gibson that stands outside Nationals Park in D.C. That’s appropriate.

The most intriguing development from the political campaign last week was that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will debate at least twice before Election Day on Nov. 5. The best night might be the first, on June 27 in Atlanta, when Trump will perform with one figurative, forked tongue tied behind his back. This is due to Biden baiting Trump into debate rules that might make Trump seem even battier than he already is. Or they might backfire on Biden.

Since the start of May, the Tigers have struck out on three figurative pitches. First, this bedrock American League baseball franchise announced a periodic replacement for its traditional home uniform, interrupting more than a century of elegant uniformity for a mere merchandising gimmick. Next came a blackout over yet another cable television squabble.