Take me out of the ball park

There are lots of "classic" TV shows of which I have not seen so much as a nanosecond...anything to do with any "Star Trek" iteration, "St Elsewhere," "Doctor Who," and "Magnum, P.I." among them.

"Magnum" starred Tom Selleck. Oddly enough, while I never watched his first show, I don't think I've missed an episode of his current one, "Blue Bloods."

I do know that in the "Magnum" show, Selleck played a private eye in Hawaii who wore OP shorts and Hawaiian shirts and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap, the home version with the Olde English "D" in white.

Another cultural pleasure of which I remain blissfully out of the loop is this thing called "cosplay," the portmanteau that means you put on a COStume and PLAY at being some famous character.

In Michigan there exits a cadre of men who are into the "Cosplay as Magnum" thing, so 45 of them dressed up as the character and went to Comerica Park for a Tigers game/bachelor party for a guy named Joe Tuccini.

If you count the cardboard cutout of Selleck in his Magnum finery, there were 46 of them, and some of them might have gotten as stiff as the cutout, and started carrying on and catcalling in the ballpark, and at least one of them was smoking a cigar. They tell me that Magnum smoked cigars on the show, as did his manservant Higgins, who was known for saying "Oh, my God" long before every teenaged girl in America started saying it.

So you have 45 men, stag, dressed as a Hawaiian bon vivant character, maybe sipping on some suds and puffing Cheroots, a-hootin' and a-hollerin', and they were thrown out of the ballpark for their behavior.

Let's hear it for the ushers and security force at Detroit's baseball stadium!