Worst. Year. Ever.

You know what this is now, three months deep in another year. This is 2020 just being a gaping orifice, and you know which one.

Us: Good lord! Can 2020 get any worse?

2020: Hold my beer.

And then takes Mr. Tiger, Al Kaline, just to be even more of a jerk.

A few words about Al Kaline, who died Monday at 85. He played right field for the Detroit Tigers for 22 seasons, which is how he earned the handle "Mr. Tiger." Also, he batted .297 with 399 home runs, 1,583 RBI and 3,007 hits across those 22 years. Also, he played right field like he invented it, was so good he went to the majors straight out of high school, and, when he was 20 years old, batted .340 to become the youngest player in baseball history to win a batting title.

That's who Al Kaline was.

Now let me tell you who else he is.

He's the guy who made me think of my father just now.

This happens a lot with baseball, because baseball more than almost anything ties generations together in America. Partly this is because it's been around for so many generations; partly it's because, across those generations, it has been an American father's duty to introduce his sons and daughters to the American game. Your father did it and his father did it and on and on back to the days when one of the few things that tied Billy Yank and Johnny Reb together, even when they were busy slaughtering one another, was baseball.

Billy played it on his side of the national divide, and Johnny played it on his. It was irrefutable proof that, even in the midst of a civil war, both sides were still fundamentally American under the skin. A strike was still a strike and the ump still needed glasses whether you were clambering up Little Round Top or standing fast on its boulder-strewn crest.

But back to my father.

He was never much of a baseball fan, but when I heard Al Kaline had passed, a specific memory bubbled up. The year was 1968, Kaline's Tigers were down a 3-1 hole in the World Series against Bob Gibson and the Cardinals, and Dad was in the hospital recovering from back surgery. And one day he sent me a note to see how I was doing -- how I was doing, get that -- and in it he mentioned the Series, and how the Tigers were "really going to have to hustle to pull this one out of the fire."

I don't know why I remember that part, word for word. I remember nothing else about his note so exactly, except for that.

But this is what baseball does, I suppose. Its shared experience imprints upon us memories that are somehow clearer and more precise than virtually any other cultural touchstone in American life. And in those days, if you lived in Fort Wayne, baseball meant the Tigers, unless it meant the Cubs (or, in the odd circumstance, the White Sox.)

Geography had much to do with that; so did the fact one of the local TV stations occasionally aired Tigers and Cubs games. So you grew up with Bill Freehan and Mickey Lolitch and Norm Cash and Willie Horton and Jim Northrup -- and of course the Tiger-est Tiger of them all, Al Kaline.

Who batted .379 in the '68 Series, and hit two dingers, and drove in eight runs. And, yes, played right field like he invented it, as the Tigers indeed rallied to pull this one out of the fire.

And now he's gone. But not, blessedly, before leaving me with a little piece of my father, who is also gone.

Stick that one up your orifice, 2020.