This is the time of the year when the sportswriters who cover baseball’s top teams spend as much time trying to navigate the mind-boggling maze of postseason travel possibilities as they do writing their daily stories.
        Believe me, it is a complicated chore that can make your hair hurt.
        Since nobody yet knows who is going to play whom or where or when in the playoffs, you have to make a myriad of conflicting hotel reservations to cover every conceivable contingency _ only about one-fifth of which, at most, you will eventually end up using.
        Who will win their divisions? Who will the wild card be? Which days will your team play?
        And you can imagine how much fun it is trying to book all of those flights at the last-minute to get you where you need to be _ with hundreds of other people, fans and writers and regular customers, trying to get on those same planes to make those same trips.
        When the Tigers were rained out during the American League Division Series in New York in 2006, I exhausted the charge in my cell phone, then spent an additional hour on a press box pay phone, just trying to arrange a flight home.
        And because I wasn’t able to book my flight to Oakland for the second round of the playoffs until the day before I departed, I got stuck in a dreaded middle seat _ between two fat guys, one of whom chomped on Pringles all the way west.
        Thanks to the Tigers, I don’t have any such worries this year.
        Of course, that means more work for my wife. She is already on the second page of her “honey do” list.