Each day they arrive in numbers we’ve never seen before. Reporters from Sports Illustrated and ESPN and CBS. From the Boston Globe and the Washington Post and the New York Times. From Chicago and St. Louis and South Florida.
        It is a tribute to the talent and the expectations of this Tiger team.
        By 9 a.m., on any given morning, half of the people lining the fence that leads to the Tigers’ Marchant Stadium clubhouse will be from Michigan. And they’re not  fair-weather fans, either. I recognize many of them from my days in the sports memorabilia business in the 1980s.
        Wherever the Tigers have played this spring, we have seen hundreds of Tiger fans, playing tribute to their favorite team with their T-shirts and caps.
         Maybe it’s because I’m getting better-looking by the day, but I have been recognized by more people, and signed more autographs,  this spring, than ever before
        “Oakland Press!” they shout and point.
        One guy even wanted two signatures from me. Now there’s a guy with too much ink in his pen.
        Three years ago, as the Tigers continued to flounder and the losses piled up at an embarrassing rate, Dave Dombrowski was under fire along with everyone else in the organization from Mike Ilitch on down.
        There were calls for the Tiger chief executive’s firing and rumors that he might be looking for another job.
        Then Dombrowski hired Jim Leyland, the farm system Dombrowski had rebuilt began to pay dividends, and things quickly fell into place.
        As a result, I recently witnessed a scene that would have been unimaginable three years ago.
        The afternoon’s exhibition game had been over for about an hour, most of the fans and nearly all of the Tiger players had left the ballpark  when Dombrowski walked out to his car in the nearly-empty parking lot.
        Suddenly, a woman who had been patiently waiting outside the clubhouse in hopes of landing one more autograph, dashed toward Dombrowski’s vehicle.
        “Can I please shake your hand?” she shrieked.
        Things have, indeed, changed.